


Grey Matters

by Unquiet_Grave



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse), Resident Evil - All Media Types
Genre: Art Theft, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark Humor, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, POV Alternating, Police corruption, Psychological Drama, Raccoon Police Station Retelling/Expansion, Slight Claire x Leon, Smut, Summary Edited, Survival Buddies, Temporary Amnesia, When Mutant Plants Attack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-18
Updated: 2019-09-24
Packaged: 2020-07-08 02:35:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 22,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19862095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unquiet_Grave/pseuds/Unquiet_Grave
Summary: "She limped right on by, passing art pieces from dozens of countries. Eras. Years. All of time was tangled together and stacked in that room, a jumbled Rubik's cube. She moved through it all, a performance piece, a living portrayal of a dream emerging into reality.Leon lost himself there, studying her, how her boots made soft sounds on the floor. Drops of water fell from the tips of her braids. Her soles were caked with mud, her shoulders and hair soaked.“You went outside,” he said. “Dropped off your loot, or lost it. You got hurt. You came back.”She froze, facing the door. Just like last time. “I did.”“For God’s sake, why?"---Leon runs into yet another mysterious stranger that fateful night at the Raccoon City police station.





	1. A Secure Place

**Author's Note:**

> So, first Resident Evil fic. Yay? Yay! I've been watching the games played from a distance my whole life, watched some of the movies, and finally got around to playing 7 and the RE2make. I hope fans will enjoy this little romp around the police station/old museum. It really was gorgeously rendered in the remake (as was Leon, obvi). So, I built a little story and an OC around them.
> 
> Many, many heartfelt thanks to my beta-reader, NoFootprintsInSand, for patiently going through the first parts and giving me her honest feedback, despite knowing less about the series than I do. ;p She's an amazing author who writes some pretty sumptuous, dark, sexy stories, and you should definitely check her out!

Something was in the dark with him.

Leon backed against the door to the west storage room. He clicked his flashlight on, gripping the Matilda in his other hand, listening.

It shuffled and rummaged about, hidden from view. Either the corpse in the ceiling had revived and wiggled itself free, or another one had materialized while he was gone. The things were like hydras. Wherever he killed one, more always sprang up. 

_Shit. And here I thought this room was safe_. 

But he’d been stuck in the archaic, zombie-overrun station long enough to adopt one basic tenet: there were no true safe rooms. Something was always waiting around the next corner.

That didn’t mean he had to let it surprise him. He had to deal with this now. No sense in drawing in out.

_I can do this._

As if challenging his nerve, a familiar dread seeped into his veins. He psyched himself up with some steady breaths, heating his blood, keeping him animated and limber. 

Chin down, he raised the gun to chest-level and began checking the room, skirting around piles of junk. Grit from the chewed-up ceiling crunched under his boots, no matter how softly he tried to tread. Funereal sheets blanketed some of the old furniture, spanning across the floor. He was careful not to get his feet tangled up in them. A trip could prove fatal, in this place.

He passed by mounds of plaster and dirt, making sure to give them a wide berth. Nests or debris, made by some kind of wall-climbing abomination he had yet to encounter. It would be too kind of fate to give him termites. Or Spiderman.

More muffled rummaging, from behind a barricade of shelves and boxes. Followed by...jingles? As in bells?

 _Tell me there’s a clown in here with me._ The irrational thought overtook the young rookie before he had a chance to banish it.

He brushed it off and shook his head, his thick bangs unsticking from his dampened brow. This place was starting to infect him, something contagious and evil and _subterranean_ permeating the air. The work of forces unseen, unknown to a mere neophyte, as daring as he was.

He was blind to the true antagonist of this plague. But, room by room, corridor by corridor, on that rainy, fateful September night, he was beginning to see its hideous image. Like a horrific car accident he couldn't tear his eyes away from.

The scents of paint thinner, chemicals, dust, rotting wood were heavy in the room. The odors of dying art, dragging a bygone era of normalcy and a world without cannibalistic monsters to the grave with them.

He paused for a moment, thinking. Everything in here was as he’d left it. Broken and forgotten.

Except that wasn’t quite right. _Something_ was amiss.

Then came that absurd, merry jingling again. The downy hairs on the back of his neck stood at attention, a sixth sense.

He focused, cycling through internal memories like photo albums, relying on some basic tricks the academy had taught him. His gaze settled on the stack of junk in front of him. _There_. A silent alarm rang in his mind. The jester doll that had been there to greet him before, sitting upright and staring with its vacant eyes, was missing.

 _Weird._ Either there was a child zombie running around, clawing at fragments of its former humanity, or perhaps…

Over his left shoulder, a skeletal shadow swept across the wall. 

Leon spun to face it, the hard, metal point of his gun held out in front of him, as tense and drawn as the needle of a compass. What looked like a humanoid shape was crouched over, grasping at something, the shoulders shrugging almost mechanically, the head lowered at an odd angle. More dread seeped in a bizarre osmosis into his bones, frosting the marrow. Sheer adrenaline dumped the antifreeze. 

He fixed his position on the animated wraith on the wall.

Another jingle. A wooden thud.

His grip on the Matilda tightened. Four shots left. Every one must count.

_Here goes nothin’._

He sank into a ready stance and pivoted around the corner, raising the light and handgun, his shield and sword. He moved fluidly, poised, prepared to unleash second-death on whatever savage monstrosity awaited him.

“ _Wait!_ ”

The monstrosity let out a girlish shriek and threw its hands in the air.

His trembling flashlight beam shone on two luminous pale arms, a white dress, a pair of ivory knees with a hint of thigh.

For a split second, Leon thought he’d stumbled upon a statue come to life.

“Don’t shoot! It’s not what you think!”

He heard a feminine voice, saw the glint of terror behind a pair of glasses. A young woman was crouched over something on the floor. Leon shined the light on a large canvas bag overflowing with paintings at her feet. Some were framed, others rolled up. The head of a miniature statue poked out as well.

The stunned girl was gawping at him like he’d stepped out of a fresco. She clearly hadn’t been expecting a living, breathing human to come stumbling around that corner.

 _‘Don’t shoot’_ . _How many women are gonna scream that at me tonight?_

Unless those thick-framed glasses of hers could turn him to stone, he doubted she posed a threat. Leon lowered his weapon. A phantom pool scampered across the floorboards, coming to rest at his boots. He clicked his light off.

Behind them, the corpse, like a bad scare prop in a haunted house, hung by its legs in a fool’s mockery. Blood dripped occasionally from its clawed fingers.

“Jesus, I could have...what are you _doing_ in here?” he demanded, fighting to keep his voice in check. 

Afraid to admit he’d almost shot a civilian. The ‘thing’ that had been so amiss to him was human sounds and movements. He’d already forgotten what those were, so used to mutilated ghouls and their mindless savagery.

The girl looked no worse for the wear. She slowly thawed from her shock, lowering her arms. At his question, her surprise shifted into agitation. Suspicion. She refused to answer, staring him down. A hardened look he had seen before, but where?

It hit him: the first time he’d seen a criminal arrested.

 _It’s not what you think._ She hadn’t been referring to herself. He considered the paintings again. Back to her, the clown doll clutched in one pale hand, jewels winking at him from its silks. She’d been trying to fit it into the encumbered bag.

“Are you _looting_?” he accused. “At a time like this?”

With a tinkle of bells (he was going to hear them in his sleep, assuming he ever slept again), she stood up. Actually rolled her eyes at him. As if this were a regular burglary call.

“Are you really gonna bust me right now?” she huffed.

She put a hand on her hip. She certainly didn’t _look_ like a looter, but he knew not to judge based on appearances. A navy plaid shirt, too big for her, was knotted around her tennis dress. She was slight. Unathletic. The type he couldn’t see defending herself in a place like this, or anywhere, really.

In short, all his ‘protect and serve’ impulses fired at once.

“And put your gun away,” she hissed. “It’s scaring me. _You_ scare me.”

 _Are you crazy?_ Leon felt like scoffing at her. But he holstered the Matilda, not wanting to frighten her off. Plus, crazy people _hated_ being called crazy.

“ _I’m_ scaring you? Have you looked around here lately?” he asked.

She bent over, ignoring him, rearranging her loot as if he wasn’t there. Twin honey-blonde braids dangled off her shoulders as she did so. She was young, a year or two younger than himself, perhaps. 21 years on the planet, and never could he have imagined a scenario like tonight, not even in his most vivid dreams. Or his blackest nightmares.

And here suddenly was this girl, this interloper, belonging to neither.

She pushed her glasses back onto the bridge of her nose and sniffed. She tried to stuff the doll into the bag again, to no avail. With an annoyed sigh, she set it on the shelf. It sagged to one side, almost dejected.

“Have to leave you behind, sorry,” she murmured.

While she busied herself with frivolities, Leon anxiously checked the corners of the room again, the doors.

The corpse. He could hear it _dripping._ Had something stashed it up there? And what was with all the holes in the walls? The claw marks?

Something had definitely made its lair here. They were less safe than he thought.

Shuddering, he turned toward the stranger. She continued to rifle through the bag, muttering some kind of list to herself. He took a second to study her face again, making sure they’d never met before. As he looked her over, he unintentionally caught the slight swells of her breasts, betrayed by the open collar of her dress.

She stood up, and he quickly averted his eyes. A faint blush crept under his uniform, and he wiped his forehead with the back of his glove.

“Why won’t you say anything?” he asked. “I’m not gonna arrest you. Bigger fish to fry tonight, in case you haven’t noticed.”

She hoisted the great canvas bag onto her shoulder. It must have weighed almost as much as she did, and she appeared to buckle a little beneath it.

“Nothing personal, Leon.”

He froze at his own name from her lips. Somehow intimate and alien at the same time.

“I just don’t like cops.” She mumbled to the doll, an afterthought, “Thank God he’s not the trigger-happy kind.”

He ignored the slight to his profession. There were more pressing matters at hand. But he was dumbfounded by her glibness. As if _he_ was the one living in this mausoleum of horrors, and she was merely visiting.

And, apparently, had no intention of introducing herself.

By the clanking and jostling of the paintings, and with a sway of her hips, she headed for the door to the library. He watched her duck under the corpse, popping up with grace...until the bag shifted, nearly dragging her to the floor. 

Leon cringed. He couldn’t think of a worse way to slow oneself down. Cement shoes, perhaps. A prime target for those _things._ She clearly had no clue what she was getting into.

He watched her stumble and sway like palm tree, firing off another round of curses that might have made his foulmouthed academy instructor blush. She finally righted herself with a few thuds of her stylish combat boots. 'Combat' in name alone, he figured.

The corpse dribbled blood again, soon to be his only company. He couldn’t stand to see one more person torn apart. He was determined to redeem himself as a civil servant, as long as there were civilians like her left to serve. He became aware he was posturing a bit, his chest puffed. He exhaled. His voice seemed too loud as he called to her:

“How do you know my name? Who are you? You’re not a cop, that’s for sure.”

The questions, as intended, made her to pause. She took a second to adjust the strap of her bag.

“Obviously not,” she snorted, as if the word ‘cop’ carried a stench.

No response from him. She reached for the door.

Then:

* * *

“Please. Don’t go out there.”

The girl turned. She saw the defeated perplexion on his face, the gleaming splotches of crimson on his uniform. Some wet. Some dry. Not his. The way he stood with his boots planted apart, stiff and coiled, ready to spring, standing against exhaustion and terror and all the other panic-driven emotions that got one killed.

Beheld the ghost of trauma, its lines slowly etching into an otherwise pleasant, attractive face. Perhaps something others couldn’t see, but she had spent most of her young life analyzing lines, shades, and colors, learning their countless meanings when applied to the human form. 

Always keeping a professional distance, and she found that tactic preserved not only her artistic integrity, but her peace of mind as well.

This one would survive, she decided, but he would hate every second. She took a mental snapshot of that naive, innocent face, determined to make a sketch, maybe a portrait of him. Preserving that troubled youth forever, a reverse Dorian Gray.

Although she might edit out that awful boy-band haircut.

She said wistfully, “You know, they were gonna throw a welcome party for you.”

How he relaxed just then, how his shoulders softened when she spoke. It was obvious that he longed for basic human companionship in this hell. For answers. She could use a few of those herself. 

Her eyes grew distant, as if seeing through the walls, the carnage. Her hand absently plucked the strap of her bag. Her dress was spotless, but her hand was stained with red.

“Rita. Officer Phillips,” she recalled. “She showed me your picture in the database. She wouldn’t fucking shut up about the ‘cute new rookie’ coming to the station. She wasn’t like the others. She was genuine. She was…”

She swallowed. A sudden bitterness in her throat evaporated, forming salty dew on her lashes. The bag dropped from her shoulder with a loud clank, and her mask slipped, exposing raw shock. Grief.

Fear.

“God, they’re all _dead_ , aren’t they?” she breathed, mortified.

As if she were standing over all their graves.

* * *

At her horrified realization, the noise the bag had made (Leon had felt the vibration in his boots) a chill raked down his spine.

His jaw clenched, and he glanced at the other door, at the holes in the ceiling. His spine tingled with drops of ice.

Nothing. Silence. They were still alone. For now. He didn’t fancy waiting around for the beast to return skulking to its lair, to discover a pair of _hors d’ouevres_ loitering around its main course.

He heard sniffling. Leon focused on the girl again. Surprised to see a single tear running down her cheek. It plummeted to the floor, mere inches away from the pool of congealed blood.

He felt a stab of pity, unable to meet her gaze. He shouldn’t have been so quick to accuse her. She might have been a thief, but people did strange, irrational things under duress. This girl had witnessed something terrible. Stealing could have been her way of reconciling, of distracting herself.

 _It’s still a crime_ , his conscience whispered. _You should apprehend her. For her own good._

“Marvin is still alive,” he told her instead. Hoping it would snap her into action.

Her grief faded, replaced with the indifferent mask. She wiped the wetness from her cheek on her shoulder, snatching the bag from the floor, possessive and swift. 

Then again, maybe the grief was the mask. He couldn’t be sure, and a little voice said not to trust her.

“Who’s Marvin?” she asked.

“Lieutenant Branagh.”

“Oh.”

He pinched the skin between his eyebrows, sighing. _‘Oh’,_ _That’s all she has to say! My would-be boss is dying, my coworkers all torn to bits, if they’re not tearing others to bits, and it’s ‘Oh’ with her._

“He’s...sick,” he added, somber.

“That’s a funny word for _bit_.”

Leon lowered his hand, clenching it into a fist. He wanted to shake the crassness out of her.

“Joke all you want, but I’m trying to get help. Getting out of here’s like trying to navigate a god-damned maze,” he growled, more to himself than her.

To his dismay, she turned toward the door, saying dismissively, “Don’t let me stop you.”

“At least tell me who you are!” he cried. _So I know what name to give your family_. He was going to have to start keeping a goddamned list at this rate.

But she was already cracking the door to the library, letting in a golden ribbon that illuminated the upside down corpse. The effect was nothing short of hellish. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw a crooked finger twitch.

“Wait!”

He thudded after her, until they were side-by-side. Usually he had better luck with the fairer sex. They cooed and fawned over that baby face of his. At the very least, they were quick to trust him. 

This girl cringed away from him instead, uncomfortable with such closeness. He backed off a few paces, holding up both hands.

“Don’t,” he insisted. “It’s _safer_ if we go together. You don’t know what it’s like out there.”

She stiffened.

“Yes, I do.”

"Things are _different_ now. Don't you get that?"

"No Leon," she corrected gravely. "Everything's as it always was. It's exactly the same. Just more honest now."

With a shove of her shoulder, she slipped out, the door slammed shut, and she was gone.

The finality of that slam rang in his ears, a knell of warning.

Leon bolted after her into the library, whipping out the Matilda at the last second.

Confounded, he checked the upper balcony. The lower floors, littered with the deceased, what was left of their heads riddled with his metal slugs. The library seemed to eternally hold its breath, silent, save for the chandeliers, moving with a squeaking, pendulous language he couldn’t understand.

There was no way she could have made that Olympian jump across the pit in the second floor. But she was nowhere in sight. She was simply gone. Vanished. A blonde blur in his memory. Leaving him to his thoughts, to the empty tables and rows of books, as the library clung to the last dregs of its former glory.

“Damn,” he hissed aloud. “Damn, damn, damn.”

Her attitude may have nettled him, but he was sorry to see her go. She was unarmed. Overly confident. Traumatized, judging by those tears, unless she was a very good actress. The next time he saw her, it would probably end in another tragedy on a night gushing with them.

Another ruined face to haunt his dreams. It was too fucking much.

His shoulders sagged as he lowered his weapon. He leaned against the wall, catching his breath while he closed his eyes. When had he rested last? Not since the gas station. Difficult to breathe, all of a sudden. It would be a lot more difficult, should something sneak up on him while he was stalling. 

He had become numb, his limbs all going offline, as if an arctic wave were crashing over him. He opened his weary eyes, gazing over a sea of scattered books, their dry old pages absorbing innards, brains. It seemed an appropriate time to catalog things. Get his head in order.

With zombies and monsters already filed under ‘existing’, Leon was starting to believe in ghosts too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "The more we change  
> Everything stays the same"
> 
> -'Too Late, All Gone', How to Destroy Angels


	2. Secret Hope

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Doing my best to update this on a weekly basis. Thanks to all who gave kudos so far! 
> 
> This work has been proofread by the amazing, diligent, insightful NoFootprintsInSand, but I've made a proper Jenga game out of this chapter, moving shit around, stacking it elsewhere, so any errors you may notice are all mine.
> 
> Also, I THINK I got them all, but if you happen to see a random letter or series of numbers/gobbledygook, you can thank my new kitten for constantly attacking my keyboard while I was writing this. She's so cute, I ain't even mad. >:3 She obviously isn't a Resident Evil fan, though. She will learn...

He heard his poltergeist before he saw her.

“...Damn it!” 

Leon tucked the map away, his head raised. Hisses and swears drifted from the art room of the east wing, not far from the helicopter crash, where the insatiable blaze continued to feed off fuel reserves.

From the lobby side of the hallway, a sliver of light caught his eye. A string of muffled curses flew from a crack in the door.

He peered through it, holding his breath. He didn’t mean to sneak, but some baseless fear whispered that the girl might vanish again if she caught wind of him.

But there she was, perched in the lunar glow of the twin lamps. Manifested out of his memory.

She was turned partly from view, hunched over and preoccupied with something in her hand. The king statue loomed behind her in wordless judgment, still grasping his scepter with the devilish jewel—a red temptation that could have been transmuted from the blood of a thousand misbegotten passions. 

Maybe even a few souls.

Despite the somber lighting, the stone retained the very hue and luster of fortune. Desire. Like a goddess among mortals, it outshone all other splendid works of art in the room, putting the auction pieces to shame and winking at him in sanguine recognition. Almost like it _knew_ he needed it. Judging by the flat, metallic rattle in the jewelry box he’d found, he had a pretty good idea of what was inside.

Of what was at stake, should a certain thief get her paws on the gem first. Not for the first time, the intangible notion that this girl was ethereal, not belonging to this world, hit him.

But of course he was only imagining it. The product of an overtaxed mind and a criminal lack of coffee and rest.

Leon pushed the door open, clearing his throat loudly.

“Fuck!” The girl whirled around, clutching her chest.

A trail of gauze fluttered from her right hand. The bag was at her boots. Flat. Empty. She had come back for more.

“Don’t mean to interrupt whatever it is you’re doing,” he said, not bothering to hide his displeasure. He shut the door behind him. “But I need something in here.”

He approached the statue.

The shockwave on the girl’s face dissipated. Little aftershocks trembled in her limbs, down her arms. She clutched her right hand in her left, flexing stiff fingers.

He had every intention of getting to the statue, leaving her to her heist. But the ugly wound on her hand stopped him. The cut had soaked clean through what looked like a wet mummy bandage. A slash of raw flesh in her palm gleamed at him between the dressings.

He stopped a few feet shy of his goal. The king was devoid of any blood or fingerprints.

She had not touched him, or his severed arm. Evidently not interested in priceless gems.

 _Then what?_ he wondered. _Why come back to this place?_

* * *

The girl glanced sideways at the king, at the reluctant defender in blue. She clasped both hands behind her back. Flinched as pain radiated down her arm. Another aftershock, over quickly.

A beat passed. Then:

“I don’t remember ordering a stripper cop,” she greeted.

Leon nodded toward the king statue. 

“I’m here for him, not you. You don’t look like you’re in any shape for a lap dance.”

She grinned fiercely, despite herself.

_Try me._

* * *

Leon saw she had little to smile about.

Someone or something had tried to erase her, had vandalized her body. One of the lenses of her glasses had cracked, and she was favoring her left ankle, her right knee bruised, scraped into crosshatches and stippling. The bandage on her hand was in bad need of changing. 

Stitches, too, if he had to guess.

Still, she was alive at a time when all odds favored the dead, and that was a rarity of itself. He resisted the urge to smile back. To tell the truth, he was too tired, and in too great a hurry. And, unlike Claire, he wasn’t sure if he should be glad to see this stranger again.

“Don’t keep His Majesty waiting." She winked lecherously at him. “He’ll be wanting that arm back, I imagine.”

The restrained smile escaped to his lips, somewhat weak. His jaw felt rusted, as though it had forgotten such movements.

The girl added, “I’ll give you two some privacy.”

And with that, she bent her good knee and picked up her bag, flinging a stray yellow braid over her shoulder.

Leon had expected her to run out on him again. Hell, he wouldn’t be surprised if she ran _through_ him, through the walls, cackling while she dissolved into the midnight hour.

She limped right on by, passing art pieces from dozens of countries. Eras. Years. All of time was tangled together and stacked in that room, a jumbled Rubik's cube. She moved through it all, a performance piece, a living portrayal of a dream emerging into reality.

Leon lost himself there, studying her, how her boots made soft sounds on the floor. Squelches. Drops of water fell from the tips of her braids. Her soles were caked with mud, her shoulders and hair soaked. Her white tennis dress had gone slightly transparent, and he tried not to stare. The plaid shirt was missing.

“You went outside,” he said. “Dropped your loot off, or lost it. You got hurt. You came back.”

She froze, facing the door. Just like last time.

“I did.”

“For God’s sake, _why_? If you found a way out of here, you should go."

She leered at him over her shoulder, frowning.

“I don’t owe you an explanation, Officer Friendly.”

Leon sighed his annoyance.

She rotated to face him. She could lunge for the door, and she might get away. Might. 

He wasn’t sure if he was willing to let her go again. He had a mind to cuff her to his side until he could find a safe way out for them.

“You haven’t even told me who you are. Let alone what you’re doing here,” he said.

“'Looting', apparently,” she chided, raising an eyebrow above her frames. “Isn’t that what you accused me of? So it must be true. The big, bad _cop_ said so.”

Leon’s mouth thinned. She moved again, slinking like a mongoose around a cobra, waiting to see if he would try anything.

“I know what _I’m_ doing,” he started. Turning, he kept his body aligned with hers, caught in some kind of gravity between them. “I’m trying to _help_ people. You only seem interested in playing hide and seek.”

“Is that what you think?”

He shrugged.

“If you aren’t stealing, then tell me what you’re doing. I’ll listen.”

Her face projected doubt, but her hesitant body language said otherwise.

* * *

The girl sighed, staring down at her boots. And here she thought she was going to make it out of this without the burden of caring about someone else. As if canvases and statues weren’t heavy enough.

She set her bag on the ground. The seconds spanned like years in there, time placed under a dark spell that accelerated age, decay. Perhaps she no longer had the energy to run. She glanced at the door one last time, at the statue, the priceless gem, and gestured to the various artifacts around them.

“You know this place used to be a museum, right?” she asked. “You must have caught on to _that_ much. I saw you plundering all those rooms, like you’re the _Tomb Raider_ or something.

“Who?” Leon shook his head. “You were watching me?”

“That's not the point.” 

Before he could protest, with a reverence unfitting a looter, she took out something from the bag. She closed the remaining distance between them, careful not to let her wound sully the small, framed painting in her hands.

“Look. Tell me what you think.”

Leon sighed ( _I don’t have time for this_ ), but obliged her. He didn’t know the first thing about art.

The image captured was simple...yet not simple. A white lotus was submerged in disturbed water, speckled by rain. It had been rendered in soft, dreamlike strokes, the painter remembering one petal, one aspect at a time. They worked in almost complete greyscale, only hints of blue, and had paid careful attention to the shadows under the water, giving them just as much depth as the gray sky reflected on the surface.

The lotus refused to fold back into the mud. It could have been drowning, or starting to recede, offering one final glimpse to the viewer before nightfall. The distortion of the raindrops was reminiscent of tears. Of things forgotten and misremembered. Mourned, even. A delicate but somber image.

“Depressing,” he commented.

“‘Depressing’,” she imitated, with added glumness. “That’s all you got?”

Leon shrugged, reaching into a utility pouch, and pulled out a can of first aid spray.

“What the hell else do you want me to say? I’m sure it’ll fetch a nice price. Here, give me your hand.”

She refused at first. She stroked the edge of the painting with her uninjured one.

“There are dozens more here like it.”

“I believe you.”

Now he reached for her wounded one, grasping her wrist gently. She didn’t fight. Just went on holding the painting, staring. Traveling.

* * *

Leon pulled her a little closer so he could look at it better. Close enough that he could smell the remnants of her shampoo. Or maybe that was just what living women smelled like, sweet and warm, and he’d forgotten.

It seemed he’d forgotten a lot of things.

“This one is very old,” she said fondly, while he upturned her palm and unwound the bandage.

It was worse than he’d thought. Deep. The kind of thing that would keep on bleeding.

“It might have survived Nazi regimes. Air raids. Fire. Water. Thieves. Looters, like myself.”

He’d have to be deaf to miss that sarcasm.

“Helicopter crashes. Cannibal monsters…” she trailed off.

“Let’s hope we’re better at surviving than it is,” he muttered.

With that, he sprayed her cut, gluing it shut. The liquid had antiseptic properties and worked as a bandage.

She acted as though it was nothing. Lowering her hand, she set the painting by her boots.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

At that moment, some curtain between them dropped, and he thought maybe, just maybe, he’d been wrong about her. But so much had happened already. She had shrunk into the background in the wake of all the new contenders on this chaotic stage.

She grabbed her bag and tucked the painting away. With no more distractions between them, she seemed to search his face, scanning for new details.

Leon was covered head-to-toe in body armor, his uniform, but it didn't matter. Under that gaze, he felt exposed. The blush from the storage room threatened to creep up his neck again. He put the first aid can in its pouch, next to the swiped objects.

“I’m glad you’re not a pilot right about now,” she murmured.

The room filled with the increasing scent of smoke and things incinerating.

“ _Something_ went down here,” he insisted, trying to get her to open up. Unfold.

She rolled her eyes, folding her arms tight against her chest.

“Yeah it did. Hard to miss that explosion.”

He frowned, and her glib expression crumbled.

“I mean the _outbreak_. What do you know about what happened here?” He pressed, “If you know something about this place, tell me. The lieutenant...he’s in a bad way. I have to hurry.”

She turned away from him, focusing on an overturned Aegean vase with a crack running down the length of it. Fractured, but not broken. The image depicted what appeared to be Hermes, the psychopomp, guiding a young soul to Charon, to be ferried down to Hades.

Outside, they could hear the flames crackling. Time would tell whether the fire would reach this room, or if the downpour would hold it back.

She mused aloud, “It’s always the same, isn’t it? Corruption. Someone knew something. Another covered it up. Innocents are the first to get hurt. Survivors survive. Wind up on Oprah.”

There was that sarcasm again, that armor. Leon wasn’t fooled. He heard the tears in the back of her throat. 

Carefully, he reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. He had to assure himself that she was solid. Warm. Real.

She was, and she didn’t pull away. He turned her gently around, using just enough force.

“Dreamy hero cops get book deals,” she finished, raising her eyes to his. The cracked lens reflected the statue behind him.

“I would never try and profit from this,” he told her. He shrugged his shoulders. “Besides, I’m more of an audio tape guy. Easier to listen to, in the cruiser.”

She smiled again. Not with the wild, pained grin from earlier, but warm. 

Genuine. He returned it with equal warmth.

She sighed, “A man who actually listens? It really is the end of the world.”

Silence fell between them. They were standing quite close, and she was considering something, her face crossed with conflict. Longing. There was more she wanted to say, but some invisible thread leading out the door yanked at her.

She fixated on the exit. 

He leaned in, drawing her attention back.

“If you’re going to leave, at least don’t go out there unarmed.” 

From his belt, he removed a combat knife. He had no firearms to spare, but he could at least give her that.

“Take this.”

She received it in both palms, as one would a live snake.

“I thought you didn’t trust me?” she asked.

He smirked lightly. “I never said that.”

But she shook her head and handed it back to him.

“I’m no good with these.” 

And she went bolting for the door, limping but agile. Moving faster now that her bag was lighter.

He couldn’t tell if it was himself or the knife that had spooked her. Maybe both.

“You have more puzzles to solve, Leon! Clock’s ticking,” he heard her call to him. “Don’t worry about me.”

But he was already running, the book, the statue, the scepter all forgotten. He slipped on the wet floor, grabbing onto a shelf to keep from collapsing.

The vase rolled and went crashing to the tiles, shattering.

“Wait! Don’t!” he shouted.

Into the hallway. The storm a howling fury, outside broken windows. He ran towards the inferno. Stopped at a dead end, at a door to hell.

For a split second, it was the library all over again. Had she walked through the flames? 

Then, behind him, the fire escape door swung shut, the alarm shrieking. He heard pounding footsteps on metal, one after another, a lively rhythm that the rain drowned in seconds.

Leon burst out into the night, looking down at the chain link fence. Up, at the crumbled wall and twisted husk of a helicopter, feeling like he’d lost his marbles and then some. Like he’d just spent the last five minutes talking to himself, imagining things.

“Gone,” he growled to no one. His hand strayed to the unused cuffs on his belt. The book and box and random items strapped to his person weighing him down.

The neverending rain soaked his uniform, washing away all the blood he’d collected thus far.

He didn’t have to worry. More would surely follow.

The future may have been clouded and obscured, but that much he knew.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Through the window, see the place  
> Like a fond and sweet embrace  
> For a moment face to face  
> In the sweetest embrace
> 
> The unfolding of the year  
> And now our season is here  
> All the balances are clear
> 
> Now that our time is here  
> Now that our time is here
> 
> -'Season Song', Blue States


	3. As One Desires

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Smut warning for the very end of the chapter.

The girl loaded the last of the paintings into the trunk of the white ‘92 Corolla. She paused for a breath, her first proper one since entering the parking garage. She had dreaded this, the final stretch before she was home free. In every movie, every book, it was always the worst part.

Yet the garage was desolate. She was the only one crazy enough to be in there.

She hadn’t seen Leon or the girl in the red jacket for quite some time. Other than the occasional reassuring burst of gunfire, the odd slam of a door or a frightened shout, she knew nothing of their whereabouts. Just that they were awfully sufficient at mowing down the ghouls for her.

Still, loneliness had clung to her throughout the long night, a wet blanket that was hard to shake. But it was for the best. They would have slowed her down. Given recent events, her solitary nature may have saved her life.

Among other things. She rested her uninjured hand on the lid and leaned in, reviewing her stash with pride.

All together, she had taken 34 visions, dreams, and ideas, 34 aspects of the human psyche all captured on a canvas. Some of them quite rare and valuable. Others, including a reproduction of _The Titan’s Goblet_ , simply because she’d grown attached to them. She knew something about each of the artists, their inspirations, desires, and downfalls.

Hell, she knew them almost as well as she knew the museum. Zombie takeover or no, a work of art was all the magnificent old building would ever be. Perhaps the goddess statue would remain standing, holding her silent vigil at the end of this long after all her subjects were dead and gone.

Assuming the government didn’t firebomb the place off the map, that is.

**_Clank!_ **

Metal clattered behind her, followed by the whir of machinery.

 _That was fast._ Her head shot up. She cast a paranoid glance at her surroundings. _Someone must have gotten word of my intent to have a squeaky-clean escape._

Too many hiding places, not enough eyes in the back of her head. The parking garage was a muted maze of abandoned automobiles. Security strips above the access doors simmered red, while the emergency fluorescents cast cold, colorless patches on the cement. The swampy reek of gasoline was pervasive, but something much, much fouler wafted from the bowels of the sewer. 

Needless to say, she was ready to leave the moment she stepped inside.

The girl turned her face toward the exit gate, trying to catch some fresh air. A combination of drizzle and wind misted down hints of water and leaf-choked gutters, the promise of cloudy autumn skies. Heaven.

The whirring stopped. She lowered the trunk lid as if there was dynamite strapped to it. The latch clicked ever-so-lightly. She held her breath again. 

_Need to stop doing that, or I’m gonna pass out._

A beast growled, low and menacing.

_Might be better if I did._

She froze. More joined in. She could hear jowls snapping and wet, ragged snarling from behind the door to the kennels. Hell-hounds, summoned to ensure she didn’t leave this underworld.

There came a mighty thud as something hurled itself against the door. Hinges squeaked. The security strip blinked, once. Another violent thud, and she heard nails raking against metal. The red light flickered a warning.

The girl took a step back, her heel crunching diamond shards of broken glass. The door shuddered, then resumed its cyclopian glare. The thick silence was now punctuated by the excited clicking of nails.

_Time to go._

She skirted along her car, climbing into the driver’s seat and fumbling in her purse for the keys, her bloodshot eyes locked on the door in the rearview mirror. The crack in her glasses made it appear split in two.

The keys tinkled as her fingers grasped them. The girl inserted them into the ignition. She paused. The unpleasant sensation that she’d forgotten something overpowered her.

_What the fuck are you waiting for, the next Backstreet Boys album?_

A twist, and the engine stirred with a polite rumble. She sighed and collapsed onto the wheel, resting her forehead against it.

“Thank God.”

The tape player came to life. A sultry female voice crooned through the speakers:

_“Sometimes it rains inside my head_

_All the words run dry_

_Walls are breathing hands are reaching up-”_

The girl sat up straight. Looked in the rearview at the door. Closed. Not even hell itself could break through those patented locks.

She hesitated, drawing a blank. She honestly hadn’t thought she would make it this far. The streets wouldn’t be a picnic, but once she was out of the city things would get better. They had to. No way the whole world was like this. No way...

_“No they don't have to take you away…”_

She switched the cassette player off and examined her palm, chewing her bottom lip. Leon’s miracle-spray held the deep laceration shut, but blood was already leaking around the edges. The nerves throbbed and ached. She might have damage for the rest of her life, might never be able to hold a pencil or a brush properly again. 

Her own Frankenstein reminder of how easily monsters could slip into human flesh and walk amongst them.

And it would have been a lot worse, were it not for Leon. There was a strong undercurrent to those mountain-river eyes of his, but no evil swam beneath.

She hoped this place wouldn’t shut them forever.

With a final grunt of assent, she drove to the gate. Parked. Got out and ran for the computer kiosk. She jerked her lanyard over her head, retrieving her guest badge and keycard. She jammed the card into the slot, nearly bending the damned thing in half.

**[Access revoked: security risk. Request new badge]**

She ripped it out.

“Motherfucker.”

It was not a general statement. She had a very specific, very slimy Motherfucker in mind.

She heaved herself in the driver’s seat and shut the door, debating. She had to sneak back in, take one of her secret routes, and swipe a different parking pass. Or she could try and access Motherfucker’s computer and change her clearance, but she didn’t even want to know what that creep’s password was. His favorite brand of bonesaw, maybe.

Either way, this wasn’t over. Someone had made sure of that.

All this endless bullshit tonight, to be defeated by a ticket kiosk. She snorted. Giggled weakly. Threw her head back against the headrest. Pressed her bleeding knife wound into the passenger seat, leaving a fresh print (no point worrying about the upholstery now).

She winced at the shooting pain up her arm. A parting gift from Motherfucker himself. Not exactly the Chief of Police’s professional title, but it suited him better than his awful cologne.

 _Wonder what that fat, misogynistic psycho’s up to now?_ she mused. _Probably getting eaten by his ‘loyal’ men. They say for every devil killed there’s a new one ready to take his place._

Which was, in her case, over her left shoulder.

A dark shape eclipsed the light out the window. The door handle clicked. She swiveled around in her seat the moment an unstoppable force came crashing out of nowhere.

The girl’s scream erupted, got the hounds baying again, but she barely heard them. Her car door ripped open, pulled by what her fear-shrunken mind could only register as a ‘GIANT’. A hand fished inside, seized her by the sleeve and threw her sprawling to the hard cement.

Her vision exploded into stars. The impact succeeded where a rookie cop had failed. It cracked all the walls around her, left her naked and exposed. For a moment, she lay too stunned to move, to scream.

A boulder was crushing her chest. Wide, sweaty fingers clamped around her throat in a murderous vice. The world went spinning out of control, surreal shapes melting together, an optical illusion expanding to the fireworks of her bursting capillaries.

Strangely, though she faced death, one particular face popped into her head.

_I should have listened to him._

_I should have left sooner._

_I should have taken that fucking knife._

* * *

_I should have stopped this investigation_.

 **Stomp, stomp**.

A pair of impossibly heavy boots echoed throughout the marble halls.

Leon ran for his life, desperately trying to remember all the barricades, what side of the station he was on, what floor. A dead-end would mean a death sentence now.

**Stomp, stomp.**

_I should have tried harder to save Claire. Save Marvin. Save that other girl, if she’s even real._

He skirted around a bend, flying past some shower stalls, their tiles broken and scattered like teeth from a shattered jaw. For a moment, he imagined himself running down the maw of a mutated creature intent on devouring him alive.

The remote part of his brain that wasn’t hijacked by survival instincts was aware he was a hair's-width from losing his mind. 

Maybe it was just the concussion.

**Stomp stomp stompstompstomp.**

A rivulet of blood streamed down his left temple, where the brute had thrown him to the floor moments ago. Waves of dizziness and nausea threatened to cripple him, but he fought through it, lying to himself that he was at the training grounds and this was all an exercise, he would be clinking beers with the other trainees at their favorite sunset bar, laughing at something their instructor said...

A massive shadow overtook his. He turned and raised his gun, squeezing the trigger. Blinking blood out of his eye. The Matilda clicked, a useless lump of metal in his hand. Out of ammo, and running out of time.

The ‘it’ crushed tiles to powder under its bulk, accelerating straight for him.

_I should have saved that last bullet for myself._

Leon scrambled out of the locker room and went for the stairwell, leaping over the fallen body of an officer, descending the steps as fast as his tortured legs allowed.

Down to to the first floor. Another ghoul clawed and gnashed at him from a broken window, trying to force its way inside.

He turned a hard left and shoved his shoulder into a door, wiggling into the evidence room. He slapped the lights off and sank down to the floor, his chest heaving under the weighted black vest, his mouth like a fish gasping out of water. Sweat and blood mingled down the side of his face.

The giant’s dreaded crescendo ceased at the bottom of the stairs. 

Leon cracked the door, peeking out as far as he dared. The ‘it’ had its broad back turned to him, half of its monstrous form awash in a floodlight spilling through the busted window.

 _When does it end?_ His mind reeled, groping for an answer to an impossible question. There was only one certain answer, and it was staring mindlessly at him from the window. The ghoul, drawn by the noise, leaned its rotted body inside, partially impaled by broken glass, heedless, reaching, teeth clicking in vain. 

The brute ignored it, lifting its massive hand up to rub the back of its own stone-gray head. Mourning the loss of its hat. It had been more pissed off about that than the bullets Leon had fired straight into its cranium.

Mosquito bites that they were, the gunshots _had_ given it something. A pause, and that was all. Long enough for him to pull himself bleeding off the floor, and scramble.

Now he was there crouched in the dark, praying the thing wouldn’t turn around and go for the door.

It did not. Leon restrained a sigh, thanking his lucky stars.

The giant thumped its way down the first floor hall. At its passing, something _other_ loosed a reptilian hiss, so loud it made Leon nearly jump out of his uniform. A warning. Even those vicious, wall-climbing abominations were afraid of it. 

Soon the stomps were replaced by the bony clicks and raps of long, wicked-sharp talons. The brute had tapped out for now, but it would come back. It _always_ came back.

The so-called safe room blurred for a second. Leon brought a trembling hand to his bleeding temple, wincing. Safe to say he wasn’t going anywhere.

He got up, his legs screaming in protest. He knew this room. There was a darkroom in the back. There might be some first-aid that he’d missed earlier. He stepped into a saturated square of red light.

As he searched the shelves and counters, he smelled something unfamiliar. Skunky and pungent. _Probably some junkie’s stash._ All his rummaging around must have stirred it up.

He followed his nose and pulled out a tin container with a plastic tupperware box inside, a few empty film cartridges with caps off, reeking strongly of marijuana. He hoped he’d find some opioids to take the edge off. On top of the stash was a handwritten note, torn from a composition notebook.

He picked it up and read it:

_I might not have made it into the illustrious Umbrella bio research division, but my buddy Frank did. Those ADD pills and study meds I dealt him in school don’t come free. Fucker owes me._

_They called the one supposedly at the mansion ‘Plant 42’. This is an offshoot of that, but way less dangerous. So Frank says. I’m gonna sell it to some folks in Colorado and make a pretty penny, but not before I figure out how to cultivate it. It’s a resilient little guy, although it hates sunlight and garlic. Frank says it’s carnivorous and secretes a powerful hallucinogen, similar to salvia._

_Only one way to find out. No one ever comes in the darkroom anyway._

_UPDATE: Whoa. Not sure what happened. The trip only lasts a short while. Don’t remember hardly any of it. Sweating. Woke up with a raging hard-on. Must have been a good dream._

_Got a bitch of a headache, feeling kinda drained. Bad burrito for lunch maybe. Crick in my neck and some drops of blood on my collar. Oh well, nothing a little bleach won’t fix._

_Additional thoughts: Thinkin’ about asking that cute nerdy chick if she likes to party. The art college one I always see doing sketches around here. Gonna slip her my number and a free sample. She’s kinda skittish and she stays away from all the pigs. I don’t think she likes cops very much, especially Chief Irons. Don’t fault her on that._

_First I gotta go take care of this headache, before it kills me._

Leon tossed the note aside. Could he have meant the same girl running around tonight, stealing paintings? And what was that about a mansion? His suspicions about the nature of this biological disaster deepened. It was all headache inducing.

In the silence of the room, the residual ringing in his ears intensified. _Must have hit it pretty good back there when he threw me. Fucking asshole._

It reverberated in his head. High and chiming, like Sunday bells, or children’s laughter. The odor coming from the box had changed, from weeds to roses. Perfume. A woman’s perfume, the dark-haired one in the trench coat from the jail...

He swayed on his feet. The black lid to the case popped off, the lid clattering to the floor.

Something shot out and grabbed him by the neck, pulling him into that sweet, suffocating embrace.

He had just enough time to utter a horrified shout before it sprayed him in the face, and his world deconstructed down to swirling atoms.

* * *

Someone shook him by his vest. 

Leon opened bleary pink eyes. His head swam, a weighted fishbowl on his shoulders. The darkroom reassembled into a runny watercolor image, clear enough for him to glimpse a pair of cracked glasses, twin yellow braids, and a pretty mouth that was drawn in concern.

Her. Surfaced from the limbo of his memories. Was this a dream?

He murmured up from the floor, " _You_."

“Don’t sound so disappointed.”

Her voice was much scratchier than last time, the vocal cords strained.

His own mouth felt full of Novocain.

“Not the...word I’d use,” he managed to puff.

He didn’t see her faint smile as she helped him sit up. A mistake. Leon cried out as his skull imploded, his vision becoming a hailstorm of white spots. He collapsed down on the darkroom floor with a groan.

"Shhh," she urged, just above a whisper. "Be quiet, okay? We've got company."

From outside the door, a shuffling crowd had gathered. Curious. Ravenous. Drawn by the sounds of wounded prey. Their inquisitive taps and scrapes amplified into pounds and moans with every noise.

 _Not good_ , the girl thought. _Not good at all._

She moved quickly, checking the evidence box to find a jumble of innocuous-looking vines. She considered the blood on Leon’s face and neck. Little holes peppered his cheeks, around his eyes. It looked like he'd been pierced by acupuncture needles.

“Doing a little gardening?” she asked. “What’s this plant?”

He shook his head, keeping his eyes shut tight. Every time he tried to open them, the room become a spinning galaxy. The dim red bulbs, supernovas.

“Cracked my head open. Used up all...miracle spray on...someone else,” he wheezed. Even with everything he had been through, he managed a weak, charming smile.

He missed her blush, her guilty wince, adding,

“Came here...looking for more. Keeled over. Frank’s fault...lotus...drown...drowning under all that water.”

“Stay with me, Leon," she called. Failing to hide her worry.

His eyelids slit open as much as he dared. She came surging into focus. The column of her pale neck was marked by savage purple bruises. A whole awful collar of fingerprints. Fresh ones.

“God, what happened to you!?" he cried. "Your throat-”

She put a hand over his mouth.

“Shh. They'll hear us.”

But he gave no sign he’d heard her, relapsing into the delirium she'd found him in.

It hit her: she was _afraid_ for him, for this man she barely knew. Afraid for her own hide as well. But she actually-

Something plucked at her boot, trying to tuck its way inside. A vine from the box. It should have been cold; plants were always cold to the touch. But, she thought, horrified, it was _warm_. As warm as a human body.

Sickened, she slammed the box shut and tossed the whole thing in the chemical water in the sink. 

Leon thrashed and groaned, louder that time. Panicking, she dropped to his side, trying to lift him by one arm. No use. He may as well weigh a ton under all that gear.

The next time he opened his eyes, they were pure glass, the pupils eclipsing his irises.

“Can you stand?” she asked. "Come on. Try."

“Mmm.” He grunted and tried to get up, straining the muscles in his arms. He fell down hard, nearly dragging her with him in a heap. 

“Can’t feel...legs. Walls...the walls are _melting._ "

The sudden panic in his voice was alarming. She leaned over to examine him. His eyes stared into empty space, seeing, not seeing. Drifting in and out.

“Shit, it's doped you up good, whatever it is,” she muttered. Talking to herself, at that point. Plus the unruly crowd at the door. How long until they figured out there was no lock?

She watched his head roll back, his neck going limp. She shook him like a defective glow stick.

“Earth to Leon? You with me?”

Nothing. He was gone. Transported off to space. She felt his brow, as hot as burning coals. He let out a loud, long moan. Muttered something about seeing ghosts.

In the other room, the dead pounded on the door. It creaked open once, before shutting again on its own.

“Fuck,” she exhaled aloud. “ _Fuck_...”

Though she could have collapsed herself, she sprang into action, leaving him to languish on the floor. Seizing the desk, she gritted her teeth and dragged it to the door. Agitated bodies thumped against it, deprived of the warm flesh and blood they so ceaselessly craved.

She tried moving the bulky metal supply chest, to no avail. She dragged a few other things instead, chairs and junk, bargains and prayers, as silently as she could. Heeding the flickering shadows from under the door, her stomach slipped into her guts. Perhaps two things on the menu tonight, but not if she could help it.

Leon’s drugged mumbling sounded from the other room, a dinner bell. Ahead of her, the door bulged. Grey fingers snaked through to rake at the paint, leaving four gouges, before she threw her full weight on the barricade and slammed the latch shut again. She tossed the typewriter on top for good measure.

_Write us a nice obituary, assholes._

Back to Leon's side, to find him worse than before. She knelt down.

“I blocked the door. You _have_ to be quiet,” she hissed. Hesitating just a second, she stroked his hair out of his face, the first genuine human contact she’d had in days. Weeks. _Now that’s fucked._ A single tear escaped and ran down her cheek, fell onto his trembling chin.

The poison was having a field day in his system. The veins in his neck stood out. His heart was pumping double-time beneath her fingers. She grasped his shoulder, astonished at the heat radiating off. His uniform was soaked. 

She looked back at the sink hatefully. A parking kiosk and a houseplant. _This is so fucked. We’re fucked._

Another strangled cry loosed itself from Leon’s throat. He was in pain. His eyes roved under the lids. Wherever that thing's cocktail had taken him, it was somehow _worse_ than there.

And they were coming. Using their bodies as battering rams against the door. She had seen it happen before. It would not hold forever.

She must bring him back if they were to survive. She must quiet him, somehow. Her hand on his mouth did no good; he kept tossing his head from side to side.

“Leon, please. _Be quiet,_ ” she begged.

He gnashed his teeth in response, uttering a low cry that threatened to swell into a scream.

“Please...”

Without thinking, she seized his head and placed a chaste kiss on his brow. Another on his nose, his lips, smothering his shout. She hadn’t meant for it to be anything other than that. Her thighs straddled him below the belt in an attempt to hold him down, and she became aware of the roughness of his pants against her skin.

She sat up, mortified. He was drugged. Indisposed. Consent wasn’t even in the picture. And what was she doing kissing a cop? _C_ _hrist, I really am about to die._

But she didn’t want to go out as strangers. Perhaps she meant it as an apology for her misconduct, and she knew he couldn't hear her now, but she bent down to whisper in his ear,

“My name’s Mildred. Mildred Akers.”

He tossed his head and groaned.

“I know, right?" she laughed hollowly. "I never told you. Now you know why. I go by Millie for short.”

Millie stroked his bangs out of his eyes. The pained lines on his brow appeared to relax. Had he actually heard her? No, it was just the poison, receding for a moment...

Behind her, the door squealed. Wood splintered and cracked. The pile of junk rattled its final warning.

Defeated, she lowered her face to his, to place one last kiss on his brow.

He tilted his head and kissed her first. Insistent. Blind. Hungry. She fought to stifle her surprise, untapped desire shooting through her tired body in a revitalizing, electric current. For a tempting moment, she considered giving in, giving him the relief he sought. She made a pathetic attempt to pull away.

He peeled up and searched for her in the dark, his hands reaching for her, needing something to anchor onto.

Sighing, she relented, giving him what he wanted, uniting their lips again. Softly. Carefully. Who was she to deny him? Not with what was waiting for them, behind that door. Besides, she had found a way to shut him up. She allowed him to continue kissing her, thinking it would be over in a moment, doing her best to ignore how _good_ those lips felt. He would be back to muttering to himself somewhere in Oz, soon enough.

But he went on. And on. Evolving, growing. Until his roving hands clamped down on her waist, keeping her pressed against him. She wrested her head away for air.

“Ada,” he sighed at her absence.

She sat back, rigid.

“Who’s Ada?”

He flinched, his eyelids twitching.

“Claire...”

She huffed her astonishment. _How many girlfriends does this guy have?_

Before she could wonder any more about it, he pulled her flush against his vest, pinning her by the small of her back with one hand, the other tangling its way through her hair. She gripped him with her thighs and muffled his occasional cries with her mouth. Whenever they parted, he sought her out blindly, tracing his lips along her neck and jaw.

“That’s it,” she encouraged, after he was silent for a while. “Come back to me.”

The toxins hadn't released him, but at least she could keep him busy. She became aware of what was rubbing between her legs, hard and insistent (definitely not a nightstick) so she moved her hands south, freeing it of its zippered restraint. Then she shimmied down her undergarments, hiked up her dress, and took him inside her in one fluid motion.

He responded by pushing up into her, and she gripped his shoulders, biting her lip to keep from crying out as he filled her. There was no instant celebration of their joining, no sighs or gasps of pleasure, only the slide of flesh on flesh, heat on heat, her hug and squeeze and hold against a black current clawing at their sanity.

She stayed perched on top, rocking her hips, pulling him out of the depths. A bit too methodical for her tastes, but it felt fucking phenomenal compared to the hell she had been through, and he filled her so deliciously, were she not so afraid of the terror outside their fragile little bubble, she might have cried out her pleasure. 

But, she wondered, looking down with concern, was it the same for him? He was still sweating so. He wouldn’t even open his eyes. His face smoothed over, all traces of pain gone. Each time she tried to pull back, reconsidering, he tugged her possessively back down. Yes, a part of him knew. She was there, allowing him to siphon the energy she was offering to him.

Neither of them cared for things outside of doors, completely wrapped up in one another. Her new lover, his sensations returning, began to thrust off the floor, setting his pace, and she stopped having to do all the work. Their hot, restrained breaths and huffs mingled in tandem. She couldn't be certain, but she swore it was having an effect, getting his blood pumping.

Just when she thought the night couldn’t surprise her anymore, he opened his eyes. No glaze, only fire. Alive and back from the dead.

“Leon?” she asked hopefully.

He said nothing, but offered her a reassuring smile. He wrapped one muscular arm around her waist, partly out of the sheer joy of having control of his limbs again. Growling softly, he flipped her over, switching their positions, and he pushed between her legs, eager to resume. She welcomed him with silent enthusiasm, raking her nails along his shoulders, pulling him on top, savoring the way he caged her in, making her feel safe and protected for the first time in hours. 

Their eyes locked together a moment, before she let her head fall back against cold tiles, swaying under the force of him. She was tired, far from delirious. The bruises on her neck cried out from the constant motion. She shut her eyes, flinching. Then she heard a gentle voice say, 

“Don’t be scared. I've got you.”

It was his turn to hold her down, to compress the fears out of her like impurities wrung from a cloth. He captured her in a tight embrace, her thin arms locked around his strong neck, legs entwined around his trim waist, pulling him deeper. He placed a hand on the small of her back and pressed her hips into his, her spine arching off the floor as he restored more of himself inside her walls.

It left no trace, but as she lay there, shuddering under wave after wave of mounting pleasure that ended with a raw, unraveling orgasm, she felt all the terror and sorrow shed free and go slithering into the shadows.

Then he was burying his face in her neck, his soft groans of ecstasy and release like miniature explosions in her ear. She felt a different sort of fear, a longing as he finished and pulled out of her. The moment of bliss was over, the both of them utterly spent. 

“Some antidote,” he huffed, collapsing by her side. His eyes expressed a seriousness that his words had not. They were thankful.

She lay there quietly, her chest heaving. A lame joke if she ever heard one, but she returned his gratitude with a smile. She pulled her underwear back on and yanked her dress down to cover her thighs.

At some point in their coupling, the dead had grown uninterested in the exhausting affairs of the living and retreated. The door had cracked in a dozen places, but held fast.

Leon gathered her into the refuge of his arms. Millie lay with her head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat returning to normal, while the combined warmth of their bodies led them into a temporary oblivion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song playing on Millie's radio is Medicine's "Time Baby III". From a little 90's film called "The Crow", maybe you've heard of it. ;P


	4. Strange Realm

Leon awoke and immediately knew she was gone.

A cold pocket of air settled where her body had rested. If he tried hard enough, he could almost visualize the slight curve and dip of her spine, the swell of her hip, the long, pleasing slopes of her legs and thighs as they had pressed against his. 

He did this, as if he could reduce all of her, the space she had so recently occupied, to one singular brush stroke, a woman-shaped motif.

Then something in the industrial sink gurgled a threat, and he knew he must be awake. Alert and oriented, lest something decide to test just how _much_ life remained in him.

Peeling up from the darkroom floor, he found there was more than enough life in his veins, the well-defined muscles all responding snappily now that his nervous system had normalized.

His head, however, was a hornet’s nest. The infuriating clash of sleep and reality swarmed him, buzzing confusing messages. Insisting, once again, he’d shared an encounter not with a girl, but with a ghost. 

_What’s with these women and their disappearing acts?_ he wondered, staring at the ceiling, well-aware he was lying on a sullied floor while the apocalypse was happening a few walls over.

But, as any man in his early twenties would, all he could do was think about women.

First to mind was Claire, her pretty, earnest face framed by chain link fence, the curtain of rain, the shadows ambling towards her. Then there was Ada, the vexatious agent who had appeared in the parking garage and, later on, the jail. While he didn’t know the slightest details of her investigation, it was obvious she was up to _something_ , and she was depending on him for an exit strategy. They _would_ meet again. He fully intended to find them a way the hell out of there.

Finally there was Mildred. His phantom with the unflattering name. At least now he had one to call her by.

His brief calm dissipated as the gurgling came back: a bog sound, not all dissimilar to the wet, clogged breaths he would hear, much later, much deeper underground, where far worse things—spawned in a wicked nursery—would stalk him at every turn. 

For now, he looked down, regarding the timid, innocuous plant submerged in the chemical bath. Limp fronds floated in surrender, distorted by the opaque water. A few bubbles rose, giving him the impression it was drowning. _Good._

He drew a deep breath of his own. His face and neck stung, the way sea spray left one’s face burning after a day on the ocean, but he was otherwise all right. Better, now that he’d had a nap (among other things). At least the knowledge that a vampiric houseplant had almost ended him hadn’t emasculated him any. Quite the opposite effect.

He glanced at the blank space on the floor. Millie had saved both their lives. Before she fled at the stroke of midnight. Speaking of the time...

Leon pulled out a watch from one of his pouches, uttering a frustrated sound of astonishment. _Forty minutes?_ Only forty minutes had passed since he’d first entered the ‘safe room’. In that time, he’d been poisoned, revived by the warmth of a young woman, and, unless his loneliness had made him truly delusional, made love to by that same woman.

Quite fiercely, if he remembered right. The receding job-well-done ache in his loins certainly did.

To the shadows, he chanced a faint, victorious smile. 

_Strange night, indeed._

He was no artist, but as he stood there, mentally preparing himself for whatever onslaughts waited on the other side of the barricade, his fingers twitched. As if searching for some tactile memory. A sculptor longing to trace those pleasing divots and swells under his fingertips, trying to force the image of her to life with the memory of physical sensations. A curious medium of choice.

 _This is real_ , he assured himself, flexing his fingers again. Adjusting his vest, his sullied uniform, his belt. Feeling more of his resolve return as he put more pieces of himself to right. _This is real._ It quickly became his mantra, as the faces converged into a mural. 

_They’re all real._ _Claire, Ada, Millie, the Lieutenant, the...monsters._ _All of it._

The emptiness of the darkroom, the rain driving hollowly against the abandoned walls, argued otherwise. He may as well be the last man on earth, standing there under the fluorescents.

He fought to hold onto whatever happiness he could. He breathed deeply. Beginning with smell, the strongest of the senses, he recalled the floral scent of light-blonde hair. A hushed voice. Heated, passion-driven breaths, followed by slower, calmer ones, the precursors to sleep. How solid and _real_ Millie had felt, underneath him, pulling him into her, lost and found at the same time.

The only good sensation he’d had this entire night, and he wasn’t even sure it had actually happened.

Then, stepping into the barricaded room, preparing to face more of the risen dead, he reached for his combat knife. His fingers brushed against empty air. 

Missing.

 _She’s learned._ His smile returned, stale. Humorless. Could he expect anything less from a thief?

Judging by the growls on the other side of the door (morose with hunger), he could have used that knife. He guessed he should be grateful she’d left him his unloaded gun. A rookie dying without his service weapon was like a knight being buried without his sword. Just didn’t feel right.

 _She picked a shitty time to rethink her stance on weapons_ , he glowered, starting to rearrange the junk blocking the door. Slowly. Quietly. Listening, always listening. Wondering, how Millie had managed to slip through, leaving everything in place so his sleeping self was still protected.

The more he lifted and moved, the hotter his aggravation got, color spreading across his face. She’d walked out on him. _Again_. No bullets. No knife. No-

With a jolt, he jammed his hand in his pocket. He was relieved to find the map, with all his clever notations, folded within.

Leon frowned. Was there some thief’s trick she possessed that he didn’t? Maybe she’d walked straight through the door. He had already once foolishly believed she was capable of ghosting through walls.

This stupid fantasizing was going to get him on tonight’s menu. Killed, in some horrible, dismembering way.

As he dragged the desk aside, clearing the last of the blockade, cursing her for leaving him there alone, convincing himself he _was_ hallucinating, that he didn’t give a rat’s ass even if she _was_ real, that’s when he spotted it: 

A bloody hand print. On the inside of the door.

He placed his right hand next to it, his fingers splayed. A chill traveled down his arm, taking the tension in his body with it. Not a sound to be heard over his pounding heart. The curve of his thumb and index finger encompassed the outward right curve of the wet print, smaller, more delicate than his own, lining up against his.

Complementary contours. A missing piece in a puzzle made of blood. Hers.

Perhaps it was the bruises on her neck, some tidbit from his domestic violence training, or simply from his own experiences grappling with death that night, but the words came to him, flowing as effortlessly as watercolors on a canvas.

_Defense wounds._

He pressed against the door until the strained hinges protested, glaring at the warning sign in front of him. It had been there all along, but he was too distracted to see, like trying to find two identical spots in an impressionist image. 

Now he _was_ angry, his rage slowly building, but not for her. Not anymore.

Because someone tried to kill Millie tonight. Maybe twice _._

And she wasn’t keen on talking to him about it. Off on some delirious, suicidal mission involving paintings and old junk he wouldn’t have given a second thought to.

It was infuriating, how helpless he felt. How inept.

 _Why?_ Why was she so reluctant to talk to him? Why all this fear and secrecy?

Before he realized it, he had trekked down the halls, through darkness teeming with homicidal appetites, all the way back to the main hall. Nobody there but the decayed, hungry shell that had been his Lieutenant, stumping about on mindless legs.

“Uuuuugh.” With a groan, Marvin’s corpse turned, or rather, his head pivoted loosely on his neck, to regard the spry, energetic newcomer as he bolted for the open tunnel beneath the goddess statue.

Before retreating back underground, Leon looked up. He could the hear Lieutenant’s shell stumbling toward him, and not because he had some boss’s wisdom to impart. Sometimes being the example was lesson enough.

He gazed up, into the marbled, solemn face of the nameless deity. A beam of light struck half, the other veiled in black. She seemed to hide a secret, different from the one he’d discovered when he put the last medallion into the slot.

No, those unmoving eyes had witnessed something. He couldn’t expect her to tell a mere mortal.

But he could go down, into the underbelly of the beast, and find out for himself.

* * *

The eyes of many beasts stared at her, hungering for a piece of her intent. Goading her to indulge in what they could not.

She had to do it.

Millie gripped the knife in her uninjured fist. The other hand dangled at her side, useless, a leaking faucet that drained her. Precious seconds plummeted to the carpet, while outside drops slammed down from the attacking skies, miniature bombshells splattering against the windows.

With bated breath, she faced the girl. Her complexion was a few tones darker than her own. Like looking into a shaded mirror. The nose, the lips, the facial structure didn’t match hers, but the colors...the hues...the eye-catching youth was all there.

The knife trembled in her grasp. Its very weight disgusted her. She raised it to shoulder height, the cruel tip held outwards. She urged herself on, while the girl’s rainwater eyes held her, transfixed. Neither pleading nor defending. 

Calm. Trusting. An innocence that cried out for protection.

_Do it._

The knife wavered. She lowered it to her side, tapping the blade against her dress. Tap tap tap.

_Why can’t I?_

Frozen in place, Millie hesitated, twirling the knife so it blurred like a lathe, recalling the first time she had seen the girl with the flowers…

* * *

_She strides into the main hall of the grandiose Raccoon City police department. Though it is replete with cops, the marble and limestone halls retrofitted to serve law enforcement, she doesn’t think any differently of the old museum. Old by American standards, anyway._

_Like her, she knows it’s more of a young adult. Scarcely out of its adolescence. Unlike its European cousins, it is virginal, having not yet felt the fires of war, the stomping, scraping boots of pillagers, rebels, or looters inside its walls._

_But that can always change. And she doesn’t doubt the building’s already tasted more than its share of blood, criminal and innocent alike._

_She glances up, at the vaulted ceiling, the high, thin windows that let in precise laser-beams of light. She thinks of nothing other than some Gothic cathedral to compare it to. Perhaps the churchlike design is meant to put arrestees in a confessing mood._

_It has the opposite effect on her, making her draw inside herself._

_She tucks her thick sketchbook and pencil case under one arm, adjusts the headphones situated around her neck, yanks out both blonde braids from beneath the wire, and walks forward. She nods at the goddess in silent greeting, several pages of her sketchbook already devoted to her. The first person she acknowledges, every morning, and it somehow comforts her._

_The second is the glassy-eyed clerk at the front desk. A curmudgeon who refuses to retire, a relic they have put on display. He takes a bite of his breakfast sandwich, and a gout of ketchup squirts down the front of his uniform._

_“God damn it.”_

_While he cleans himself off with a napkin, cursing softly, Millie flashes her guest badge and yanks her headphones over her ears. It’s all he needs to see. There is still trust among strangers, here._

_“Stay out of trouble,” the clerk cautions her as she walks away. Stern, but friendly._

_Not too much trust, after all. Wouldn’t want to anger the police chief._

_Millie is slightly nervous, and it shows in her fidgeting, in her artwork. She’s scheduled to meet Chief Irons this morning. She was supposed to on her first day, but Irons is a man of many engagements. Meetings, charities, banquets, press announcements, you name it, he does it. The living personification of the RPD’s slogan: We Do It._

_An absurd motto, one that makes her snort each time she sees it. She guesses the portly, soft-spoken, unassuming chief is an all-right guy. He certainly promotes himself as one. But his no-nonsense attitude, the amount of clout he wields, not just among the police, but among the city and the elites, turns her stomach._

_Through the headphones, interrupting the silence of the hall, Shirley Manson’s voice croons:_

_This house will burn straight down to hell  
_ _Take its conscience with it  
_ _As it falls  
_ _Nothing said could change the fact  
_ _My trust was blind you broke the pact  
_ _If God’s my witness God must be blind_

 _If flesh could crawl  
_ _My skin would fall  
_ _From off my bones and run away from here  
_ _As far from God  
_ _As heaven is wide..._

_She reaches into her purse, finds the pause button. Damned CD-player is always starting up on its own._

_Behind her, she can hear the herd of hungover officers dragging themselves in for duty. No chatter, just the plodding footsteps of the sleep-addled, their paper bag lunches rustling. She has been coming here a month, but she refuses to speak to any of them. Occupational hazard._

_She cranks the volume on her Walkman high, hits play, and heads for the library._

_Unaware she has caught the attention of a ghoul wearing a man’s disguise._

* * *

_Officer Rita Phillips skirts around the goddess statue, sipping from a Styrofoam cup. She has finished her morning walk around the building, which she does every morning (and because the second floor bathroom is always empty)._

_From the top of the grand staircase, she cranes her neck at the third floor balcony, peering into the shadows there. She freezes, for just a second, then takes another sip of cold coffee, hiding a frown that borders on a scowl._

_Her eyes follow a straight line from the balcony, downward, to watch Millie slip past the door into the library..._

* * *

She stood before the girl, imagining a thousand deaths.

Death by fire, her skin burning off in sheafs, her clothes aflame and dripping. Melting into nothing. Death by water, the rain diluting her to particles, to be washed down the drain and carried out to a vast, dark ocean. A sea of lost loves. Death by dismemberment, a dozen frenzied hands clawing, ripping, shredding her apart, a thousand jigsaw pieces too scattered to reassemble again.

At some point she realized she was not just looking at a painting.

Millie allowed herself to cry, telling herself the ceiling sprung a leak. The rain had finally pierced through feet of limestone, steel, plaster, and concrete. Sure.

 _The Flower Girl_ stared calmly from within her oil-painted world, expectant. Waiting.

The girl with the knife and the bloody hand stared back.

Then she raised her fist and plunged the blade down, cutting a thin, precise line.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lyrics are Garbage's "As Heaven is Wide".
> 
> The painting Millie sees is 'The Flower Girl', by Charles Cromwell Ingham (1846). It can be found in-game in Irons' office, among other strange and telling works of art. ;)


	5. Memento

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My heart-key-felt thanks, as always, to NoFootprintsInSand for combing through this, offering suggestions, and helping it make more sense. It would simply not be as good of a story without her. A thousand green, blue, and red herbs and first-aid sprays to her, and may she be showered with ink ribbons.

Millie gripped the combat knife with both hands, trying to steady herself as she cut the painting free. The frame was mounted fast to the wall. Chief Irons certainly didn’t want it going anywhere. It was less than ideal, damaging a piece like this, but it was better than the _alternative_.

What that was, exactly, she couldn’t name. The town was overrun. Every instinct in her body screamed she must leave Racoon City with her collection, as soon as possible.

Just this _last_ one, and she’d be finished. Released.

As she started the second cut, dragging the blade smoothly across the top of the frame, a delinquent smile spread across her lips. Her index finger caressed the indented grip of the knife. Though she looked directly into the calm eyes of _The Flower Girl,_ only one face surfaced in her mind. The same captivating one that had haunted her all night.

_I’m a fool._

She could have left this abomination of a city at any point in time. The truth was, she _wanted_ to stay. To see him again. Preferably not while he was writhing in agony on the floor, with a horde of undead trying to break in. That was what this was all about, now. 

_A fool with a crush on a cop,_ she thought, concentrating. She flinched as the knife pressed against her wound. Something blocked her light, and she had to shift slightly to see what she was doing.

_And it’s probably gonna get me killed._

* * *

_She consigns herself to her daydreams, while all around a nightmare takes root. It will be a while before the terror emerges._

_And that will be weeks before the zombie outbreak._

_But she is not the only one to catch wind of the corruption plaguing the RPD._

* * *

_What an odd situation…  
_

_An officer with short blonde hair ascends the grand stairs, carrying her ever-present cup of coffee plus one._

_Millie tries to seem distracted as she sketches a pencil drawing of the lion statue. She has always loved big cats. Such fierce defenders of their pride, lions. She doesn’t see herself in these powerful, social creatures._

_I guess, you see, I have another daydream..._

_So she sits on a wooden crate, her pencil working, Ace of Base_ _blasting in her ears. Just another fixture, a youthful exhibit. One that attracted some attention on her first day or two, but now she blends in. She’s old news._

_“Hello! Got a minute?”_

_She jumps, surprised to hear someone addressing her. She pauses her Walkman, and the CD spins to a halt. The female officer looms over, peering at the beginnings of her sketch with mild interest. Millie leans forward and blocks it from view._

_“You’re the intern right? The one from the art college?”_

_She presses graphite harder into the paper and messes up her linework._ Why are cops always so nosy?

_“Yeah, that’s me.”_

_The woman extends her hand, smiling. Millie sets her pencil down and shakes it._

_“Officer Phillips. But you can call me Rita.”_

_Rita offers her the spare cup._

_“Millie.”_

_She takes the coffee, but doesn’t drink. Sacrilege, for a college student. But she finds she isn’t thirsty. No one breathes a word to her this whole time, but the day she’s supposed to meet the chief this woman wants to buddy up?_

_Rita senses she’s uncomfortable, a fish out of water. She gets straight down to business._

_“You meet Irons yet?”_

Like clockwork _,_ _Millie thinks_.

_“In about five minutes. He wants to meet after his lunch.”_

_“Cool. I’ll come with you.”_

_A statement, not an invitation._

_Millie slams her sketchbook shut, tucking the pencil into its case. The zipper’s broken, so she has to be careful placing it in her bag._

_“You don’t have to do that.”_

_“Yeah, well, we wouldn’t want you to embarrass yourself in front of the Big Boss, now would we?”_

_“...It’s just a simple introduction. I’m sure he’ll kick me out after five minutes of boring him to death.”_

_Rita shrugs, distracted all of a sudden. Two officers are dragging an unconscious man across the foyer like a human sacrifice. His shoes leave a meandering trail of black scuff marks on the polished stone._

_Millie will never get used to seeing such things. And she thought she was having a weird morning already._

_Rita insists to her, “You’ll want someone who knows the guy along with you. Irons can be a hardass.”_

_Millie goes on staring at the meandering drag marks. Not like she has a choice in the matter. She only wonders why this woman is so insistent._

_“C’mon kid. Just trust me.”_

_Surprisingly, she does._

* * *

_Her meeting with Chief Irons goes as expected: exceedingly dull._

_Introductions are exchanged, and then she tells him the truth: her professor wants her to study a building, ceiling to floor, and report, sketch, paint, and write a dissertation on its significance to art history. Somewhere around ‘art history’, she notices his and Rita’s eyelids starting to droop past no return, so she wraps it up succinctly._

_Irons placates her with harmless questions: what parts of the station does she want access to, when, why, etc. Does she understand the rules about her security clearance and what time she’s allowed in and out of the building?_

_Only two things stand out._

_One is his menagerie of taxidermied animals. Their artificial glares burrow into her from all corners of the room. The man is a bonafide gun nut. Someone who loves shooting things, taking them apart, putting them back together._

_The second is her: ‘The Flower Girl’._

_Millie almost misses her. Only when Irons invites her to take a gander around his office does she spy the oil portrait._

_There’s something about this innocent flower merchant, offering the potted, drooping fuchsia to the viewer, contrasted with the vibrant bouquet in her other arm. Roses, carnations, hydrangea, lilies, dahlias. Something hidden in her expression, too subtle to be coquettish, but it’s in the way she offers up a symbol of unrequited love._

_Placed next to her frame is a statue of a robust male body, the arms and head both missing, as if cleaved off with an axe. Naked but for a cloth covering the genitals. It raises her hackles. Millie even goes so far as to ask Irons._

_A mistake._

_“She’s pretty. Is she authentic?”_

_Chief Irons snorts brusquely from behind his desk. Millie can’t tell if he’s offended._

_“Lord, no. The real one’s at the Met. Not even my connections go that far, miss. That would be quite the implication.”_

_Rita, hovering by the timber wolf, springs into action, joins her and places a hand on her upper arm. Millie has to check twice to make sure it’s not a blood pressure cuff._

_“I see,” Millie backs off. She offers Irons a curt smile. “Just curious. I’m taking a class on art preservation.”_  
  
Chief Irons puffs his chest a bit, an irate walrus. “See that you keep attending it. That one’s a replica.”

_He grins, and it’s arctic. Millie tries to brush off the harmless insult, but it sticks to her._

_“Now, if you’ll excuse me, Miss Akers. Officer Phillips. I have a call I’m expecting.”_

_He waves them off like they’re a bad smell. Before they go, she casts one more sideways look at the painting, at the girl offering her wares._

A fake, _Millie thinks as they leave. The air tastes cleaner outside his office, and her breath comes easier._ We’ll see about that.

* * *

_Rumors in the break room multiply like they’re in a petri dish. Millie listens to the officers gossip, poking at her vegan quinoa and perusing a nauseating book on taxidermy. From the grand library she has also borrowed three books on violent criminals and psychopaths._

_The officers say the overnight cells below the station (where she refuses to go) are filled with junkies, homeless, and tweakers, even more jumpy than usual. Some of them are_ relieved _to be locked up. They blame bad drugs. Some rotten batch or other going around, taking care of the ‘problem’ for them. They can’t speak to what their instincts are screaming._

_Raccoon City is going rabid. Something about bitemarks. Disturbing reports from the morgues._

_The casual way they discuss the dying of the helpless, the destitute, only drives Millie further into isolation, deeper into her studies._

_The station is immunocompromised with corruption. All it takes is one bad germ, and everything falls apart._

* * *

_It doesn’t take her long to make a set of duplicate keys. Why they’re shaped after playing cards, she can only guess. All she has to do is flirt with a young guy from evidence. He jumps at the chance to help. Of course he can make molds of the keys for her!_

_In return, she promises him a date she has no intention of showing up at._

_Thanks to certain events, she won’t have to._

* * *

_She has been there a while now. Long enough to memorize comings and goings, schedules and meetings. She gets to know the museum intimately._

_One night, she stays past her allotted time. Waits patiently in the library, for the stragglers to finish their research. She doesn’t have to hide, perfectly transparent in plain sight._

_She waits for the hour to stretch closer to midnight, then gets up and heads for the door with the heart-shaped plaque, the universal symbol for ‘love’. There is anything but that inside Irons’ office._

_Somewhere close by, hidden from view, there’s a young woman’s heart suspended in a jar of formaldehyde._

* * *

_The copied key of hers slips effortlessly into the lock. Like it’s pleased to receive her._

_She takes samples just to be sure, but she knows within five minutes. ‘The Flower Girl’ is real. A morsel of gossip she won’t share with anyone. Not worth causing a fuss._

_But damn, it’s good to be right. Fuck Brian Irons and his smug exterior._

_Millie steps back from the portrait, dusting her hands on her jeans. Certain she’s caught the chief of police in his lie. Maybe he purchased it through proper channels, but he seems like the type of man who would boast about it._

_She takes her bag of samples and sneaks quietly out of his office. The glistening heart plaque swishes into place without a sound, while her own flutters like a trapped canary in her chest._

_On her lips, a foxen smile. She made it in and out of the hen house, unscathed._

* * *

_It’s later into the night. All is motionless and quiet as a mausoleum. The sensation of eyes staring at her crawls across her skin._

_Just as she’s about to round a corner, she hears the door to Irons’ office burst open, followed by panicked clicking. It’s irregular, accompanied by a muffled thump._

_No time to hide. It’s coming right for her, and fast. Millie wheels around._

_A young woman is flying down the stairs. Almost in slow motion, her feet skitter across dull moonlight. She gets halfway down before she sees Millie and freezes, one manicured hand gripping the banister, and it’s all she can do to keep from falling._

_She’s missing a stiletto. No purse. No nothing, not even words._

_Millie, drawn to bold lines first, sees dramatic, smoky makeup. Smeared lipstick. A black dress with a short hem, a plunging neckline. Next come the minor details, but those are often the most crucial. Three of her nails are broken off on her left hand. A series of red marks puncture each arm, enraged halos that too closely imitate human teeth. Her right breast is exposed, and even that hasn’t escaped the savage bite marks._

_Someone has tried to eat her alive._

_The woman pulls her dress strap to cover her nakedness, then runs right by Millie. Air whooshes between them, her single heel click-clicking, her stocking foot padding after._

_Millie hangs there, stupefied. She holds her breath. She can smell the air from his office: cigar smoke. Whiskey. Animal pelts._

_Two layers of silence battle one another._ _From the landing above, Chief Irons rasps a thinly-veiled invitation, “Go ahead. Run. Tell someone what you saw. What it is you_ **think** _you saw.”_

_She swallows glass. Her skin prickles._

_“No? Then get_ the **fuck** _out of here. No one will believe you anyway.”_

_She thinks for a moment. He hasn’t seen her. It’s a blanketed threat; he hasn’t called her out specifically. She can still leave this unscathed. She can...she will..._

_Released from his yoke, she breaks into a wild canter, boots thudding, and never looks back. Never sees or hears of the woman. The traces of The Flower Girl remain in their glass purgatory forever._

* * *

_“Hey intern! Got a minute?”_

_A few days later, Rita summons Millie over to her computer._

_“It’s nice to have you back,” Officer Phillips says, smiling. “Hope that flu didn’t lay you out too much. Seems like everyone’s getting it.”_

_“Still feeling kinda sick,” she admits, scanning the room for a certain someone. “...But I’m sure it will pass.”_

_She has returned to the station with a new goal: avoid Irons at all costs. The smart thing to do would be to leave. Report what she saw to her university adviser. She’s considered pleading with him, transferring to a new location, a nearly impossible feat in and of itself. After all, she has no proof._

_She’s considered a lot of things lately, but each option looks worse for her health than the last._

_She moves closer to Rita, the only person she remotely trusts in this place, and leans over her computer screen. An image is trying to load, one bar at a time. Finally, after what feels to Millie like an eon, it does._

_And that is the first time she sees Leon S. Kennedy._

_Rita gushes, “Isn’t he a babe?”_

_Millie, her opinion of cops at an all-time low, thinks,_ Another pig for the animal farm. Yay.

_But she gets a good look at his face, and she can’t help but lean forward._

_“Who’s he?”_

_“The newest recruit,” Rita says excitedly. “He’ll be transferring here soon. Name’s Leon.”_

_“Leon,” she remarks thoughtfully. “As in ‘lion’.”_

_The two of them consider the flickering image. His photo bothers Millie. He is her age, and his eyes are too innocent. Unspoiled by his profession. What would this angelic newcomer think of his psychotic boss? Of his coworkers’ ignorance?_

_Casually, so the other officers can’t hear, Rita leans in and whispers, “Staying out of trouble?”_

_She fights the urge to retreat, go back to her etchings. To run pell-mell from the RPD and its stalking shadows that have no earthly business moving, and never look back._  
  
_“Yes,” she lies. Swallows dryly._

_“No one’s bothering you? You can tell me if they are.”_

_Millie goes rigid._

(What it is you **think** you saw.)

 _What exactly_ did _she see? Nothing the chief of police wants out in public. She feels sweat begin to form at the base of her spine. Her neck is hot around the collar of her shirt._

_She is surrounded by police, typing away, filling out casework. Following the orders of Chief Irons. Nothing happens here without his mark of approval. She wonders if the woman in the stairwell now has her own file in the ‘missing persons’ database..._

_“N-no. Why would anyone-” she stammers._

_“Good!”_

_Satisfied, otherwise certain the conversation isn’t going anywhere, Rita pushes out her chair and gets up._

_“I’ll let you get back to your studies.”_

_She turns off her computer screen and escorts Millie out of the office._

* * *

_Days pass. More people disappear. It’s as if the whole world is raging about something. Some nameless injustice done, and no one to defend it._

Hey, they can’t all be because of Chief Irons, right? _Millie asks herself one morning, after throwing up in the women’s restroom. She can’t tell if it’s guilt or the news reports making her sick._

_Riots break out and fester. Her university cancels classes. One evening she finds she can’t return to her dorm, so she climbs back into her car and fights the worst traffic of her life, driving to the only place left in the city that’s safe._

_The RPD headquarters. Her museum._

_But even that has changed. Its usual serenity has collapsed into a hive of organized pandemonium. The front hall has become a makeshift triage unit._

_Chief Irons is nowhere to be seen. Hopefully because something one-upped him on the crazy scale and ate him._

* * *

_A mob swarms the press room, where a group of survivors are curled up in their sleeping bags. Millie is hunched in the corner, wide awake and for once not dreaming. In the pitch-dark she hears the first screams, the gluttonous uproar of things feeding, of people wriggling in their bags. Prepackaged meals._

_The cameras have been disconnected. The world will not see this. She doesn’t want to see any more._

_She runs into the hallway, shrieking bloody murder. She bolts for an elderly couple with their backs turned._

_That’s when strong hands grab her tightly by the shoulders, spinning her around. She half expects to see Irons bearing down on her._

_“Still alive, intern? You always were good at hiding.”_

_Officer Rita Phillips smiles at her brokenly. Millie’s mouth drops open._

_The old couple swivel on stiff, unfeeling legs._

_Rita whips her gun from its holster and fires, hitting each in the forehead. The rotted pair advance on them, merely agitated by such a rude greeting. Ribbons run like cracked eggs down and around their noses from the fresh bullseyes._

_Millie can do nothing but stare, petrified. Perhaps it’s the complete and utter bizarreness of the situation, the threat of her impending mortality, but a confession boils out of her:_

_“Chief Irons is abusing women!” she shouts, over the grunts and snarls. “Maybe even worse than abuse._ That’s _why he’s missing. He’s up to something.”_

_Rita laughs. A futile, bitter sound. “Yeah. I got that impression.”_

_She dumps her clip, slaps in a new one. Millie shoots her a confused look, and she hastily explains,_

_“No way he would have agreed to let an intern run around here without a leash. But I caught him staring at your picture. Then at YOU, from the third floor.”_

_Millie has no time to process this. The ghouls are plodding voraciously after them, their jerky, puppeteer-yanking-on-strings movements making her stomach knot._

_“You_ knew _?” she groans._

_“I suspected. And that’s good enough for me.”_

_Rita takes aim at the old man again, her left eye squinting shut. Hits him square under the jaw and out the back of his head. His molars chime as they hit the floor. Like the Energizer Bunnyhe keeps on going._

_“Then all this bullshit happened. We’ve got bigger problems now, intern.”_

_Hell if that isn’t the truth. They have run out of air to back up against._

_“Rita?” she whimpers._

_“Hide!” the officer bellows._

_She opens a locker and shoves Millie inside. All she can see between the slats are two wild eyes, a splash of window and wall behind Rita. Branches lifting in a strong gale. The storm enveloping them._

_“Don’t come out!” Rita barks. “No matter what.”_

_Through the slats, Millie sees lightning flash. Instead of thunder, more gunshots._

**_“WHY WON’T YOU DIE?!”_ **

_The new motto of the RPD._

_She sees Rita’s dissected image, a splash of white and yellow, then only shadows, tangling together. The clicking of a trigger being pulled, again and again. A scream, wrenched free by open lungs, exposed to the air. The elderly couple embrace her and invite her to permanently join them._

_Millie departs from their little dinner party, her eyes rolling in her head, and leaves the solid confines of the locker for some alone time with her subconsciousness._

* * *

_Black clouds burst open._

_Rain begins to dilute the pools of blood, sucked away by the foundations of the museum, like thirsty mosquitoes to an artery._

_Somewhere in an office full of furs and books, a girl waits patiently for her savior. Trapped by the dimensions of her frame. She is adept at keeping still and silent._

_Millie slumps unconscious in the locker, kept safe by a good cop’s dying efforts, while all around the food chain turns topsy-turvy._

_A lionhearted rookie stumbles into a gas station, searching for people in need of help._

* * *

_The locker door squeaks open._

_Millie pokes her head out. The hallway is clear, save for a stampede of bloody footprints. Gore, gore, everywhere, but not a drop on her. Plenty of tears though._

_She trips while climbing out, tasting bitter iron. That’s what she gets for biting her tongue. Rita and the old couple are gone, probably in search of a snack cowering in the break room._

_A lightbulb swings above her head, blinking on and off._ Now what? _The obvious answer is to leave. The evil unleashed there is still at work. She can hear it through the walls. There is no one left to help except herself. Wasn’t that always her priority in the first place?_

_She heads for the nearest window, its glass pane shattered. She rests her palms against the broken pieces jutting up from the wood, and leans out into the rain. It carries her grief with it. The wind, her sobs._

Something _good has to come of this. Something human. She could preserve some of this place’s former glory. She could rescue them, take them into her hands and give them new homes. Safe places._

_Really, she just wants to spite Chief Irons. Spite death. So she chooses blood over rain, and backs away from the window._

* * *

_She’s underestimated so much. Not monsters. People._

_There is a malevolent absence of order here. She isn’t a fighter. All she can do is run._

_He catches her prying a painting off the wall, and comes at her from behind with a hunting knife. She sees his shadow and gets her hands up just in time, blocks the worst of it by gripping the blade. It bites down to the bone, the most agonizing thing she has ever felt. But she gets away._

_“Strike one!” he laughs after her._

_The pounding of her bloody hands leaves a primitive pattern on the walls of the station._

* * *

_The second time Irons finds Millie, he’s upgraded to a gun._

_With a grunt he throws her out of her car and starts to choke her, as three Dobermans burst furiously through the door._

_It’s her life or his._

_Irons directs the shot he meant for Millie on the first dog to pounce. It takes a chunk of his arm with it, and he howls louder than the hounds._

_Millie doesn’t stay to watch. She gets up, flees from the garage to the pop-pop-pop of gunshots, the barking and yelping of beasts._

_“Strike two!” she hears. “Until next time!”_

_She’s starting to think the chief of police is an asshole_.

* * *

  
Almost done.

Before she could make the final cuts to painting, she felt warm metal press against the back of her head. 

“Strike three.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Shame, such a shame  
> I think I kind of lost myself again  
> Day, yesterday  
> Really should be leaving but I stay"
> 
> -Massive Attack, 'Dissolved Girl'


	6. In Search of Lost Time

Millie froze. _The Flower Girl_ ’s face became enshrouded, the eyes sunken with disappointment. Funny how art could change depending on her mood.

Of course, the distortion wasn’t all in her head: the chief of police’s shadow stretched across both her and the painting. A trick of the light.

“Irons,” she greeted flatly. “Thought you’d be dog food.”

“Unfortunately for you, no. Drop it.”

She let go, but the knife stuck fast to the canvas. _Christ, even his weapons refuse to quit._ She might have smiled, were some homicidal police chief’s idea of justice not looming over her shoulder. How had she not heard him?

 _Guess he’s got plenty of experience stalking young women._ _Sick fuck._

“Turn around.”

She had no choice.

Chief Irons was an accurate portrayal of how shitty she felt. He had changed his clothes since the parking garage fiasco, but he was haggard. The rain had soaked clean through his shirt and hair. Someone else was running him in circles tonight. Maybe one of Leon’s multiple girlfriends.

It pained her, how badly she wished he was there. She had to stop pointless wishing, or fall to pieces. And she wanted to hold onto her limbs for as long as possible.

Then she felt the blood rush to her brain, as Irons leveled his pistol roughly to the height of her abdomen.  
  
“First that bitch Claire and the little brat. Now you,” he growled in disbelief. “I don’t have _time_ for these fucking games. I need to get back to the orphanage.”

“You’re murdering kids now? Fantastic.”

The gray mustache above his lip flattened. For a chilling second she thought he might shoot her point-blank in the guts.

“W-what are you waiting for, then?” she stammered. She didn’t have the courage to scream ‘get it over with’, much as she wanted to show him she wasn’t afraid. Another trick. Another illusion.

He appeared to consider the question, a vein in his forearm twitching. Millie shut her eyes. 

A beat. She opened her eyes. A broad grin was stretched across that hateful, scarlet face. Beneath it, a man-shaped shade lurked under the surface, manipulated the flesh, moved the jowls and spurred the voice.

“I _could_ shoot you right here,” he almost purred, gesturing languidly with the gun. “I’ve enjoyed hunting you down, I admit it. You might have eluded me before, but I figured you out fast.”

He tapped his temple and nodded at the painting behind her. Adrenaline had her thinking faster, analyzing every word. What did he mean by ‘before’? She had a sneaking suspicion this wasn’t about her stealing art.

“Killing you,” he uttered, seemingly enjoying how she wilted under his poisonous aura, “would be too easy. Too _messy._ ”

“Hate to ruin your carpet,” she squeaked.

He ignored her.

“I have a better idea. One that lets me keep my hands clean and takes care of _you_.”

She shut her mouth.

He lowered the gun, taking a pair of handcuffs from his pocket. He made her put her hands behind her back and slapped them on. Her injured hand throbbed. She thought she might faint.

She cringed away from his touch as his fingers pried and poked the bandage.

“Such a nasty cut,” he remarked in her ear, withdrawing his hand. “Too bad you didn’t bleed out.”

“Happy to disappoint, asshole.”

He made a brusque, uncaring sound and shoved her out of his office, into the hallway. 

Unlike a certain paranoid rookie who always checked his corners, Irons barged his way about like he was in charge of these monsters. _Maybe he is_ , she thought as he forced her up the stairwell. The same one she had watched that battered woman run down, what felt like ages ago.

As if clipped from a film reel, she imagined the desperate woman’s ghostly memory plunging into the moonlight below them. She peeked over her shoulder at her captor’s face.

She saw that she wasn’t the only one reminiscing.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” he asked. “That night.”

She gulped as he confirmed her worst fears, nodding once. What point was there in lying now?

“Knew it,” he hissed. “What were you after? The painting? Were you going to rat me out to your little joke of a university? Or maybe the police?”

He laughed, a grating, metallic grinding of vocal cords.

She wheeled and spat in his face.

“Fuck you. You’re a lying psychopath.”

“Hm.”

He grunted and swung the butt of the gun, striking her shoulder so savagely she stumbled on the last step. To her credit, she didn’t cry out, biting her lip with everything she had.

“Always the quiet ones,” he muttered. “Knew there was something about you. Tell me, how did you get in my office? I do so _hate_ interruptions. And I always lock the door.”

She would not deign to answer him. He reached forward, digging around in her dress pockets, retrieving the set of duplicate keys. He took them with a scowl and pushed her toward the east storage room. 

“What did you do to her? To that woman?” she asked. Hating how small and fearful she sounded. "Where were you keeping her?"

She prayed his answer wouldn’t surprise her. At this rate she had an entire fucking economy of nasty surprises.

Irons scoffed.

“Didn't get to do everything I had planned. She was a feisty one. I heard you sneaking around the front of my office and left to investigate. She slipped by me. She thought she got away, stupid girl. I made sure she got hers in the end. A mercy, really, given how things are now.”

Like a perfect gentleman, he opened the door. Swept his hand out in an ‘after you’ fashion. The gun winked at her from his other.

“No one escapes me for long. I _always_ win. Now MOVE.”

No point in refusing with a loaded gun in her face. She stepped inside, cringing. This was it. This was where he would execute her and dump her body like a used prop.

But the door slammed instead. The lock clicked. He was thinking smarter: trapping her would save him a bullet. As for the death part…

She spun around. Scanned the bars of light and shadow for threats. Now she knew how the slaves had felt when they were sealed up for the long sleep with their pharaoh. No vases and chests, though. Only shelves and boxes and plastic-wrapped packages. Although the air did have a tomb-like tinge to it.

She spun again, facing the door, heart drumming.

“What is this?” she groaned.

Irons’ muffled growl came from the other side:

“A reunion is what. Give my regards to your friend. She always had an eye out for you.”

He’d meant to scare her, but he only succeeded in throwing Millie into a sudden fury. She couldn’t grasp the full meaning of his words yet.

“Fuck you, you fat sack of shit! You fucking psycho! Let me out of here!”

His voice slipped smoothly under the door:

“Oh I don’t think so, Mildred. I had hoped I’d stumble across your tattered remains earlier. The fact that you’ve survived this long is...annoying.”

That’s all she was to him: an annoyance! A thing to be ticked off his list of cover-ups. She kicked and slammed against the door, sliding down to her haunches. 

No more stale professionalism to his words now, only acid. Its burn peeled away at her skin:

“ _Scream_ all you want. It won’t help. I can’t risk you getting out of here, telling someone what you saw.”

 _(What it is you_ think _you saw.)_

After all that had happened tonight, he was still worried about afterwards. Paranoid they would investigate him and put an end to his ‘fun’.

 _Fucking snake,_ she despaired, pulling in vain against the handcuffs, teeth gnashed. _Thinks he can slither out of this, unscathed._

“No one’s gonna give two fucks about you, when they see what became of this city!” she cried. Pleaded, her face pressed against the cool door. “The entire place is a homicidal bloodbath. Let me go and I won’t tell a soul. I swear!”

A pause.

“Irons?”

No use. He was long gone. 

And she was not alone.

Under the ceiling lights, she caught a flash of yellow brass: a nametag. Her eyes widened as she saw the chief’s insurance policy in full, visceral color.

A corpse with short blonde hair, one eyeball dangling from its socket, came stumbling into her. It seized her by the collar and yanked her abreast of it before it lowered its mouth to the nape of her neck, as if it wanted to gossip, babbling and croaking the language of death.

* * *

Leon emerged onto the second floor roof. Where the brute in the trench coat had tried to reenact the final scene of _Die Hard_ with him. Except instead of trying to pull him out a window, it had tried to punch him off the side of the building. So really not _Die Hard_ at all, although he was starting to relate to John McClane.

_Maybe if I keep waiting here, a director’ll yell ‘cut!’ and this will all finally make sense._

There came no cut, but there was a break in the rain.

He stood in relative peace for a moment, head thrown against murky skies and watery floodlights. All the world felt like some malicious force was trying to dissolve him and wash him down the drain.

A scream swept across the rooftop, shattering the calm.

“God damn it.”

Reluctantly, he turned in its direction. Third floor. Storage. Right above the chief’s office. Didn’t need the map, it was burned in his brain.

Another scream.

Too high-pitched to be Claire. Ada seemed like the type that would rather jump into the giant sinkhole than show fear. Which meant...

Whatever he’d gone up there for, he forgot it instantly.

Heavy RPD-issue bootfalls broke up the silence like scattered gunfire, fountains of rainwater spraying in his wake. The door to the fire escape closed with a sharp bang.

* * *

Millie lay flat with her arms pinned under her back, one leg folded under the thrashing body of the late Officer Phillips. At some point in the attack several cans of paint dumped over. Their struggle marks left a trail of chaos in cardinal purple, ochre, and indigo on the floor and walls.

Her friend was presently trying to snap chunks of her face off, the jaw unhinged, the torn lips gnashing. Godawful noises erupted from its gray throat, and the loose eyeball swayed like the world’s worst rearview mirror decoration. The elderly couple had devoured most of Rita’s organs, leaving nothing but bloody party streamers.

She wormed her foot up into that wet, unfathomable mess. Her boot found purchase against the spinal column. She kicked with all her might. It snapped in two, and her leg extended against empty air.

“Jesus Christ!”

Rita’s torso crashed down on her, into a pool of ‘caput mortuum’.

“GET OFF!”

But of course the severed, empty husk of a thing did not heed her.

She whimpered mindlessly, trapped in a corner. She couldn’t get her other leg up in time. The sudden dramatic weight loss had no effect on Rita’s corpse, whose clicking incisors were now dangerously closer to her throat. It dragged itself forward by its claws like some kind of naked abyssal creature in search of a new shell.

The last bit of fight in her extinguished. A wail tore free from her lungs, went sailing into the ceiling like a banshee.

An explosive sound cut her off. 

The snarling face looming over her morphed outward with a spray of viscera. The upper half of Rita, faceless, nearly headless, collapsed and lay still. The murderous hands clawing her throat went limp.

The world dripped brightest crimson. 

It blinded her as it bled.

* * *

The officer was down. Dead, in the traditional sense of the word. It lay in a bizarre vortex of spilled paint.

 _Nice_ , Leon thought, lowering his shotgun. _A+ shot. Not that anyone’s grading._

Seconds later, when Millie failed to move or respond, his smile evaporated.

He pulled the zombie off her, doing his best not to look at the mutilated officer. Millie was curled into a ball, shaking.

“Are you hurt?”

“Off...me...get it off…”

He used his universal key to unlock the cuffs, trying to be delicate with her wrists. New purple bracelets matched the bruises on her neck. His anger boiled forth, but he had no face to direct it at.

At first.

After what Ben had told him before his untimely end, Leon had his suspicions. He wiped a blue smear on the cuffs away with his thumb, revealing engraved initials: BI. Brian Irons.

He threw them away in disgust.  
  
“Did it bite you? Let me see.”

“OFF _,_ ” she babbled, wiping at the mask of gore on her face. “ _Get it off!”_

Leon grimaced. He reached out to seize her shoulder. She felt so small and delicate, like she would shatter if he gripped her too hard.

She didn’t seem to see or hear him. Her once white dress was completely fouled with blood and paint. Her face looked like _Carrie’s_ post-prom.

This place was _eating_ them. Sinking inside, somewhere subdermal. Unless he acted fast, some stains could never be removed.

They became a part of you.

“Fuck this. Hang on.”

* * *

Rain again. Pattering against her face, cool and welcoming. A downpour in summertime. 

A dream. She was in no hurry to wake up.

“Still with me?”

Her eyes shot open. Water gushed from a showerhead. Leon held her under the stream, so that she was seated on his knee, her feet and legs poking awkwardly out of the stall. She glanced up, squinting

Her rescuer had ditched his vest, his belt and weapons in a pile on the floor nearby _._ Her folded, cracked glasses on top of it all. She looked down. The drain was tainted by the bloody deluge running off them. 

Gradually, the circling red clouds faded to pink, to clear.

She sighed mutedly against his chest, “I never thought I’d shower again.”

“Same.” A pause. “But I had to do something. You were in shock.”

_Shock,  
_

shock,  
  
s h o c k . . .

A wave of dizziness swept over her. Her brain had endured a hard reset; it hadn't quite found a signal yet.

It took her another second to figure out where they were.

“You lunatic. You ran all the way to the other side.”

She lifted her head and offered up a feeble smile of gratitude. He grinned down at her, and it was velvetier than an ampoule of morphine.

“Think you can stand?” he asked.

She managed to slide off his pant leg and wobble upright. He stood and continued to support her.

“Is it safe?” she whispered, wiping her eyes, though there was nothing to wipe away. She wasn’t sure she would ever stop.

“For the moment. Believe me, I checked. Millie, back there, who was that-?”

“Shh. Not now.”

Maybe it was the draw of his embrace, or the fact that she didn’t trust her legs not to faceplant her into the tile, but she pressed into him. Just for a moment. Just to catch her breath. Letting the water drum on. 

A brief space of peace, more delicate than the skin of a bubble. The two of them made quite the tableau, their bloodsoaked shapes leaning together in the stall, lightning throwing odd shadows across the white walls.

Her ear found his heartbeat. Once, twice. The rhythm of life and all its horrors. Its pleasures too. She didn’t think she had enough blood left to survive a blush like the one that hit her then.

How _much_ of the darkroom did he remember?

Of course, she was being stupid. He’d been poisoned, delirious. It was a passing thing, once in a lifetime. Born out of desperation. She needed to stop this, stop clinging to him like a diva and stand on her own two damn feet and get the hell-

He lifted her chin so she was forced to face him. At his touch, the meeting of their eyes, blue engaging blue, she still doubted. Perhaps he was checking her for a concussion. Perhaps he wanted to get going. Perhaps-

Wordlessly, with the water still cascading over them, he leaned forward and kissed her.

_Oh, he remembers._

Leon pulled back. “Did you just smirk?”

“This hardly seems like the time,” she said weakly. “Or the place.”

He nodded halfheartedly. She adored the way the water slicked his hair, how he had pushed his bangs back. So tempted to reach out, stroke those locks flat with her fingers.

“Do you care?” he asked. His breath heavier than before against her chest.

She dared not answer.

That time, he was the one who smirked. It transformed into a smile, a defiant one not meant for her. But it was all she needed. 

She grabbed the hem of her stained, tattered dress and peeled it over her head. _Fuck it_. Their clothes were a lost cause. She threw the soggy garment to the floor. An act of rebellion. 

He watched her closely, finding her display amusing. Arousing, too, judging by the bulge in his pants. 

That done, she placed her palms along his jaw. The sleek wetness of his skin coasting under her thumbs intoxicated her. She wanted to run her mouth over him, taste all of him. Starting with more of those lips.

She leaned in. He stopped her for an agonizing moment.

“I’ll take that as a ‘no’,” he laughed. His breath life-giving against her chin.

“ _Shut up_.”

Their situation not entirely lost on her, she meant it. Besides, she knew more than one way to express herself.

* * *

Piece by piece, they took turns hastily peeling off each other’s clothes, the threat of someone—something—catching them making things that much more intense, more _necessary_. Millie gasped when the hot water struck her naked, tortured skin, until Leon quieted her with another kiss. They were soon cleaner than they’d been all night.

It would be a shame to waste it. What became a race to get clean quickly turned into something else.

There was nothing about his body that didn’t say ‘please touch’. She went wild, starting with his hair, moving to his neck, chest, and shoulders, down across the grooves and bumps of his abs, reaching to stroke along his cock, unable to resist seeing what it felt like to lazily run her fingers all along that springy length. How she ached for more time...

“All right, that’s enough.” 

Her eyes, fixated south of his navel, shot back up to his face. Leon smiled deviously and grabbed her wrist. 

“My turn.” 

He handled her like she weighed nothing, pulling her on top of him, lifting to pin her back against the shower wall. He kissed a line down her neck as he situated himself between her legs. The shock of his lips raised goosebumps, so light against her skin. She had forgotten the ferocity in gentleness. Had protected herself from care and affection.

Now suddenly here he was, erasing everything stamped on her. Hardly a mark on him, but she was decorated in battle wounds. His mouth at her wrist, one hand gently clutching her injured one, his fingers on her thighs, between her, inside her, his warm breath on her nipples, his soothing whispers in her ear worked more miracles than any pain reliever. Eventually she had to bite her lip to avoid killing them both.

With each thing he got right, he became more determined, more insistent, a man freshly broken out of prison. High on escape.

Once he had her good and snug against the tiles, he reached down and guided himself inside her, his hand quickly returning to support her backside. She wrapped her legs around his waist, sliding his cock against her deepest places. Her head was thrown back, but on that final push home, she heard him restrain a cry. Not because he was afraid of slipping or making too much noise, but because of how right it felt, how dizzying and arrogant, to push this much _life_ inside her on a night so rife with death.

He had quite a lot to give her, and he gave it hard and fast. Millie’s free hand shot up and gripped the shower head for extra support. She arched her back, offering her hips for him to anchor onto when their fucking reached its peak. They let the falling water drown their sighs and cries of pleasure. Leon worked her against the wall, pushing, pulling in a slippery, manic ritual that no living creatures there had any right to engage in.

But, thief and cop, they each knew when laws needed to be broken.

* * *

They dressed quickly afterwards, their sodden garments unnatural against their clean skin. No time for locker talk. Each wore the same solemn expression of weight on their shoulders: things left undone, unaddressed. She would not speak to him, even as they returned to the ruined grand hall together, giving Marvin’s body a wide berth.

Then they stood side by side before the towering statue. More or less complete strangers. In their short time pressed almost entirely together, Leon felt he knew secrets about her she had never told anyone. And her him.

Nevertheless, he sensed a gap widening between them.

Millie regarded the goddess with a soft, nostalgic expression.

“So, that was her riddle. A stairway.”

“You didn’t know about it?”

She shook her head.

“Huh. So you don’t know everything after all,” he remarked.

Millie rolled her eyes. He turned serious again.

“Who was she?” he asked. “The officer, back there.”

“Her name was Rita Phillips.” Millie shivered, rubbing her arms. “She looked out for me. I never thanked her for it.”

He would have reached out and touched her shoulder, had she been close enough.

“Sometimes,” he said, “we don’t have the chance.”

Leon glanced at his fallen lieutenant. He would never get used to it: losing people so fast. Stepping into the revolving door of his life and out again.

In the corner of his eye, she rotated, scanning him over. Not for the first time he got the sense she was memorizing his face.

“Who’s looking out for you, Leon?”

“Myself, I guess.” He paused. “We’re out of time here.”

“Almost.” She took a single step towards him, keeping her arms folded. “How do you do it? How do you take action so easily, and trust it’s the right thing?”

He shrugged. “Part of my design.”

“Do you believe the things you should have done can haunt you?”

He considered the snowy face looming above them. The careful hand that had shaped it, carving and chipping into solid stone.

“Yes.”

She bowed her head.

“A price was paid tonight,” he heard her murmur.

He said, “None of this is your fault. Your know that, right?”

She had other thoughts, but chose not to share.

Never one to flounder in despair, Leon walked away to open the supply chest. His own voice pummeled him as he spoke into its lightless depths.

“Listen, where I’m going there’s no coming back. I have to know you left this place. That Irons won’t find you.”

“He won’t. And I will.”

Footsteps, growing fainter. She was walking away. No hug, no kiss goodbye. But that was his ghost for him. Like someone _else_ cold and distant he’d met tonight. Someone he’d kept waiting in the jail for too long.

He reached deeper, his fingers combing the bottom in search of stray bullets. He told himself he’d need every last one. 

Maybe he just hated to leave things behind.

“Leon.”

Only by the softness of her touch did he not whirl around in panic. One slender arm wove around his middle. A hand squeezed his shoulder. Her breasts lightly brushed against his arm.

A rush of air against his temple, a dove’s wing.

“Thanks for looking out for me.”

Then, coldness. Nothing.

“I’ll show myself out.” 

_Out,_

_out,_

_o u t . . ._

Her voice rang throughout the hall in diminishing returns before it finally dropped away.

The lid fell with a slam. He didn’t bother chasing after her. The silence told him everything.

Besides, he was already late for his date with an FBI agent. Unless he’d been wrong about her, too.

* * *

She watched him run down the secret passageway, feeling betrayed by her museum, with all its secrets and tricks they’d shared. She had spent far too much time trying to figure out that damn puzzle.

A wistful part of her would have given anything to go with him. She could float easily under his protection, as one was supposed to do when up to their neck in rapids. But he hadn’t wanted her to follow, and she feared what else lurked at the bottom of Pandora’s box.

In short, she’d had enough bullshit for one night.

Besides, she was beginning to see prudence in leaving things alone. It was time to put this rotten city behind her. 

Soon.

First, she had to see about a girl.


	7. What They Became

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A million thanks to NoFootprintsInSand for making sure this doesn't totally suck, and for her infinite patience with my procrastinating ass. Her kind and thoughtful observations helped make sure this thing stayed breathing and sentient, not just a shambling, brainless husk of a story. My thanks to everyone who gave kudos and commented as well! I always appreciate thoughts and feedback. <3

“Half an hour, Leon,” Claire bargained. “Just give me that, then we can go to the movies.”

It wasn’t much of a barter. He would stay there all night, if she asked him to.

“Fine. Half an hour,” he said. “Then I’m seeing _The Dark Knight_ with or without you. Deal?”

She beamed.

“Deal!”

The bustling metropolitan museum was nauseatingly busy. As he and Claire entered arm in arm, Leon didn’t bother reading about the exhibition. Too many bodies crowding the place. He’d rather endure rowdy teenagers in Batman shirts and their spilled popcorn. 

He found a rare secluded corner and parked himself there, checking (for the umpteenth time) beneath his jacket that his concealed handgun was in place. These days, mobs of any kind put a foul taste in his mouth, like oxidized iron. He popped a mint, chewing on wintergreen, and read the little placard next to the oil painting:

_‘The Flower Girl’ by Charles Cromwell Ingham, 1846. Believed to be the original piece, which was illegally acquired via black market trading from the Met. It has since been restored and reframed here, with permission from the former owners._

_One of several pieces generously donated to our museum by persons unknown. This diverse and unusual collection is from the venerated Raccoon City art museum, which had been retrofitted into the Raccoon City police department before the bombing incidents of 1998 took place._

He leaned forward until his nose almost touched the text, not believing what he was reading.

_The staff would like to thank the anonymous donor for courageously preserving these timeless works of art. Most of the artifacts from the museum were lost to the conflagration. Now, we at least have a window into that furtive past._

_If you look closely, can you still see all the blood, Leon?_

He blinked and read it again. He must have imagined that last line.

All around the gallery, the macabre paintings popped out at him, one by one. Innocent in appearance, yet their familiar auras unsettled him.

_What is this shit doing here?_

Was this Claire’s idea? No way she would have brought him to this kind of exhibit. She couldn’t even watch _Shaun of the Dead_ without making excuses to change the channel. And why did he suddenly feel like there were eyes scorching the back of his skull?

A peal of musical laughter rang behind him, quickly swallowed by the din. Goosebumps prickled down his spine. He pushed and shoved his way through the chattering maze of shoulders and legs, a miasma of cologne and perfume, searching.

For what, or who, he wasn’t entirely sure.

“Watch it!” 

He almost collided with Claire, standing among a group that had circled around some depressing monochrome painting.

“C’mon.” He placed a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s get outta here.”

She elbowed him playfully in the ribs. “No way! I wanna see this one.”

“Claire, don’t you recognize these?” he asked, careful not to say too much. The night was still young. He didn’t want to upset her.

Her jocular smile wavered.

“Leon? What’re you talking about?”

Before he could explain, the crowds pushed their way closer, herding them along. He anchored himself to the floor while Claire timidly floated up to the painting: a white lotus, sinking underwater. Or was it emerging? Leon was too far away to tell.

Out of the corner of his eye, silver flashed. A pair of earrings caught under a crystal chandelier. Beneath it, a mound of blonde hair pulled into a sloppy updo, belonging to a woman in a layered pearl dress. She chatted closely with a tall, broad-shouldered man in a business suit. 

Leon watched, transfixed. She extended her hands to adjust the man’s tie, and he got a good view of her palms.

He breathed a deep sigh of relief, or disappointment, it was hard to tell. No scar. No glasses. No braids. No bloody tennis dress...

“Take a picture,” the woman’s date suggested blithely, glowering straight at him. “It’ll last longer.”

Leon acted like he hadn’t heard the man. The woman turned her slender back, with her companion’s meaty paw on the small of it. The pair walked in synchronized tandem, her date shooting him one final leer over his shoulder.

“Babe? You okay?”

Claire gripped his arm and squeezed it. The chill in his spine deepened. She pressed her curves against his rigid lines. Her promise of warmth, of laughter and a shared bed, kept him tethered to his sanity.

“Let’s get outta here, big guy,” she murmured in his ear. “If the movie’s sold out, what else do you wanna see?”

“I...I don’t care.” He reconsidered. “ _Anything_ but horror.”

She laughed. “That’s a given. You ready?”

“One sec.”

She heaved a sigh. “Really?”

“One minute. That’s all.”

He pulled away. She released him, somewhat taken aback. Hard to believe _he_ was the one begging to stay.

“Don’t keep me waiting,” she huffed.

“I’ll be back, I promise. Meet me outside.”

He wove a path to the only display not swarming with people: a battered, rainwater-splattered sketchbook that was resting on an open pedestal. The label said something or other about being ‘accidentally mixed in with the donations’.

Forgetting his surroundings, he opened it.

Everything was rendered in charcoal, the old pages smeared and torn. Full of doodles of Gothic renaissance architecture, notated in small, slashed handwriting: balconies, arches, and a church-like ceiling. 

A man bent over some library books. A woman in blue, sipping coffee on the stairs.

A maiden, trapped behind bars. A proud lion, unfinished.

He flipped to the last page.

Was it any surprise that he saw his own face staring back at him? 

A younger, less tarnished reflection of himself. Soaked by rain, enfolded in shadow, and illuminated by a bright flash of lightning. The style had improved significantly, as if the artist had rediscovered this book years later and had added something recent, showcasing their improvement.

Or maybe, they had rushed to preserve something before they forgot it.

He took one final moment, memorizing. The only admirer this weathered and waterlogged thing would have all evening. He longed to spend hours with it, pouring over the recollections and the shared images. Ripping old scars open.

But he’d made a promise, and it wasn’t like him to break it. With a quiet sort of reverence, he closed the cover, lowered the dusty relic, and left it where it belonged.

He almost made it out before he heard that laughter again, clear as a bell. So unusual. He couldn’t remember her ever sounding like that (what had there been to laugh about, anyway?), but he was dead-certain it was her voice.

Leon gazed up at the VIP balcony, at a demimonde of quirky artists, their agents, friends, and collectors, shrouded in gray clouds of cigarette smoke. Carefully, he scanned the faces of those red carpet people he would never associate with.

Well, almost never.

He smiled. The people on his level were probably wondering what the idiot standing in the middle of a gallery was grinning up at, but guessing was all they could do. It was a private exchange, meant for him and only him.

Satisfied, he left that mysterious backdrop behind, crossing into the foreground of wide, sunlit streets, where Claire was waiting for him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In a game of display  
> We break in two  
> We perform the ornate  
> Escape
> 
> We're alive somewhere else  
> Still asleep someplace new  
> We're ahead of our time  
> Floating through
> 
> The sky is falling down  
> This night belongs to you
> 
> -'What Happened to You?', Deftones


End file.
